This blog is about shaping and curating my thoughts. Over the past few weeks at work there's been a lot of talk about strategy. So that's what is in my head, so that's what you get to read about today. Starting with the most common question...

Isn't strategy just fluffy crap?

It's not, and that's why I've written this post.

What is strategy?

There have been thousands of words written about strategy, and this post is highly unlikely to add anything particularly original to the conversation. However, it astounds me that so many organisations and teams completely and utterly fail in setting strategy, which should arguably be one of the most basic functions of leadership. Maybe it's harder than it seems to me, but I probably spend too much of my time thinking about things¹. Strategy is about setting out a course, a direction. It's about:

• Agreeing what you're trying to achieve.
• Understanding the context in which you're operating, the options available to you, and the constraints you have to adhere to.
• Deciding what you're going to do to achieve your goals from the options available to you.
• Developing a plan to deliver what you've decided to do.

This might all sound a bit... simple, but it's amazing how much bad strategy you see if you spend any time in the corporate world. I'm not going to rant about bad strategy, but if you want to know more I highly recommend Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt.

Why is it important?

"Success comes from a model of the world sufficiently accurate to produce good strategy, and the effective execution of precise tactics." - Ludic

There are too many options open to most of us on a daily basis, and if we have to go back to first principles every time we have to make a decision, we'll end up missing out because we'll end up going over old ground and never get to new, original thinking. I've had lots of projects where every time there was a decision to be made, we start from scratch every time and have to revisit every other choice we've made before we can get to the new material. This exhausts teams and saps the will from anyone caught up in the project. Good strategy gives focus.

Strategy is the only real way to unify people in pursuit of a common goal. It gives them a framework in which they can see a clear outcome and know how to structure their own personal decision making, without having to refer back to leadership. Good strategy is empowering.

Yet I still encounter the idea that strategy is essentially useless, and that's because bad strategies are everywhere, and bad strategies are demotivating and don't do anything valuable. This tends to be when we notice strategy most, because when it works, it feels as if it's what we've always done. Good strategy fades into the background.

What's the secret of doing it well?

As with everything in life, success is all a matter of choices. Choice is one of my favourite topics, but when it comes to strategy the trick is about being willing to take the information you have (which is never as much as you'd like), work through what the information means, and then commit to a course of action.

This is rarely something that is done in isolation, and should involve teams and stakeholders, but in the end one person or a small group of people will commit to a strategy. Some of the best teams I've ever known (including the one I currently work in) remain small because as soon as you have more people than you can usefully fit in a single strategy session, your coordination overhead goes through the roof and it's even harder to get full buy-in to a strategy.

Therefore, a good strategy can't be rushed, is developed collaboratively with those who will be tasked to deliver it, and ends with a set of clear actions that people can own and deliver independently. I'd summarise this as:

Think: Take time to understand your context

Pick: Choose to do something (and implicitly choose not to do everything else)

Do: Have a proper plan and implement it

The reason so many people think strategy is useless and fluffy is because one or more of these things is missing. So instead of a strategy, they have a bunch of weird aspirational statements that add up to precisely nothing.

So what?

This is my first proper post on the blog, so I'm trying to be a bit more measured in how I present myself. So while it is tempting to turn this into something more provocative, I'll leave it at this:

Don't work for strategically bankrupt leadership, and if you are leadership, invest time and effort in developing a good strategy.

The Photo (nothing to do with the post): Gas Works Park, Seattle, 2012. Nikon D90, 1/400s, f/10, 24mm, ISO 200. Two exposures stitched in PTGui.