I had the opportunity recently to explain to a friend who was new to strategy, what it is. Sadly, I didn't take a photo of the lemon cake we enjoyed during the conversation, but these muffins look pretty good too!
This person's only experience was a strategic plan that they had been assisted with writing, which had ended up feeling like an unachievable burden.
As a result, he was going right back to basics and asking, do we even need a strategy? Or is it obvious what we have to do? Can't we just adapt as we go and respond to opportunities as they arise? What actually is a strategy, and is it really helpful?
I reflected on our discussion afterwards, and thought I would share a few insights.
There are many, many ways of describing what strategy and strategic thinking are, and no one right way, but we must understand what we mean.
To me, strategic thinking, which produces strategy, is the linking of a deep understanding of context and organisational philosophies, to the picture of 'how are we going to focus our efforts to do this?'. I simplify this by saying strategic thinking is fundamentally about linking actions to goals. I do this because I think it is helpful to get back to basics. This is what my friend needed. He needed to connect with the fundamental purpose of what he was meant to be doing, to test if it really was necessary and valuable.
When people get caught up in writing strategic plans and considering what they are 'supposed' to write, they forget to think.
A strategy is an insight.
It is a belief about what we should try to achieve and how best to achieve it, within our context. That requires an expert to deeply think about the full complexity of the situation they are working within. Which is why I'm not a fan of strategy consultants who will write your strategy for you. Ok I might be being a bit harsh, and potentially simplifying the strategy consulting process. They will have a lot of valuable skills and knowledge and perspective that are worth drawing on, but there is no way they can fully appreciate the complexities and nuances of an organisation's context without living and breathing it every day like its leaders are.
Some CEO's call this 'connecting the dots' or 'seeing round corners'. But you don't need to be a CEO, you just need to be informed enough to do the necessary dot-connecting so that you can link the context with your decisions about the way forward. You can't have an insight about what to do, if it is not rooted in a deep understanding of the context.
Yes, strategy can be organic and emergent.
Henry Mintzberg is my reference here. He wrote a brilliant article on exactly this, relating the strategy-making process to gardening.
Strategic thinkers are thinking strategically all the time. It's a way of seeing the world, and a way of being. Once you understand it, it doesn't make sense to think in any other way.
Here's a quote that a friend shared with me recently that helps to explain this. It's by Oliver Burkeman (from his book, 4,000 weeks):
Present-moment intent. The best answer we can put our finger on for now, given what we know. Which will change. Constantly. This is why I'm not a fan of annual strategy retreats - if that's all you're doing in the way of strategic thinking. Or glossy strategy documents - if that's where the strategic thinking stops (the glossy documents do serve a purpose, but that's another big topic).
Burkeman's quote also relates back to my previous point. If we are just looking to produce an annual strategy document, we are positioning ourselves to produce something that is out of date by the time it gets back from the printers. If we see ourselves as strategists every day of the year, we are instead looking for evolving strategic opportunities just as we would tend a garden, and we are formulating and reformulating our present-moment intent all the time.
So do we even need a strategy? I say yes, as long as we stay grounded about what we are actually supposed to be doing as we create it. There is nothing strategic about a strategy that feels like an unachievable burden. If there are too many goals, or goals that are not achievable, the context has not been understood, nor the implications of it consciously and bravely considered. If we can't achieve the goals of the strategy, we never had a strategy in the first place, because we never truly thought about the realities of how we will connect our actions to them. And if that is the case, we just may well have forgotten the thinking part of strategic thinking, and instead set about to produce a document because we should.
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