Strategy: making decisions and progress faster, better, and easier
If you knew me in person, you would have an idea of how much I find the word "strategy" abused these days. It is not that I don't see the value. I do. It is just that too often I observe that it means different things to different people and in different contexts. I just happened to have learned to prefer a more precise language that brings clarity.
I actually went as far as to previously call that out as a kind of "tragedy of the perpendicular", a.k.a., when the tail wags the dog. Meaning that allowing strategy to take precedence over execution is a mistake. Now, executing with strategy - that is all fine and good; in fact, it's advisable. Yet even more powerful is informing your strategy as you go along, executing, and as you learn.
Now, where does that lead us when it comes to strategy? What should we make of it to maximize its leverage, then?! What about making use of reframing to be more precise about what we mean by that?
Strategy is about enabling constraints so that decisions can be made faster, better, and easier.
This idea of strategy aiding decisions to be made faster, better and easier, I am borrowing from Petra Wille's book: Strong Product People. To call it "enabling constraints" is just an application of complexity theory - constraints can enable when they provide useful guardrails for progress to be made in a given or set direction.
This is all well and good, yet rather conceptual. Anyone can just write something up as a strategy and claim that it will yield faster, better, and easier decisions, but how can we keep ourselves honest? In other words, how do we effectively know we are making faster, better, and easier decisions?
To some extent, this is just one of those situations where "you will know when you see it…", but even something as simple as reflecting on how confident we are that the defined strategy is simplifying things in those dimensions is already helpful. Then we can also ask ourselves whether there is enough clarity on the strategy as articulated - meaning not only transparency (people know about it) but also understanding (people can articulate it and in fact behave in consistency with it).
Other signs (credits again to Petra Wille) that help reflect on the clarity and utility of our define strategy are elements like:
Focus - is it clear what critical business problems we are after (solving)?
"Not-to-do" - does it help us to say NO more often, acting as a filter?
Purpose and meaning - does the strategy inspire by offering that?
Where we are headed - does the strategy give us clarity in that sense?
The key here is how confident we are in answering those questions positively. And treating any reluctance or negative answer as a weak signal to do more work.
Yet another interesting interplay of what can help us reflect on the clarity and utility of a defined strategy I can think of is with John Cutler's tweak on Johanna Rothman's drivers, floats and constraints framework. While that is primarily designed for shaping initiatives or projects, I do believe there is an element of that which is applicable for reflecting on at the level of a strategy:
Do we have only one or two Drivers as our goal—what we hope to optimize for?
Are there too many (limiting) Constraints, even if only implied - what are the things we need to navigate through?
Do we have enough room for flexibility (Floats)?
Have we considered enough how we could artfully put in Enabling Constraints - e.g., what are the things we could live with now, even if we need to review later on?
All those aspects and reflection upon them should eventually provide us enough observations and data-points to assess whether we are achieving the more-down-to-earth purpose of that better frame to a too-often overblown concept of a strategy… Put in slightly different words:
Being deliberate and intentional about our choices to make progress flow faster, better, and easier.
Speaking about "deliberate" and "intentional", part of it is also being more specific whenever adding value without incurring unnecessary constraints (i.e., it's a balancing act). Here is a very simple example from a recent experience:
Instead of saying something like "we will favor facts over feelings", or that we will "first understand the outcome instead of just building something that was requested by a stakeholder (i.e., an output)"...
We could just call out what we truly meant in the context:
"We will stop acting like a factory of features and rather aim at understanding what behaviors or decisions we can support with (new) features we will build and maintain".
The litmus test of a strategy put into execution is how much action and results, as well as behavior changes (both outward and inward-looking), are driven in ways that feel less of a burden (constant alignment and realignment, high transactional cost of keeping stakeholders at bay, etc.) than it would otherwise (when not having anything put in place). Again, here, there are likely some reflection points we could think of, but it is largely a case of…
"You will know when you see it!"
By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact