What bothers me about strategy

There is a word that I feel like is often sort of "abused", overused, overemphasized even, perhaps:

It is not that I don't see the value, and I totally get why people refer to it, the clarity that it can bring forward and all of that. But I just can't help to perceive how that has been somewhat glamourized. This is not even the first time I write anything about this. Here's a piece I wrote some time back on how I see the interplay between strategy, plans and execution, where I also made a reference to how overemphasizing strategy might be seen as a sort of "tragedy of the perpendicular", aka the tail that wags the dog - in the sense that…

Largely, sharp execution and planning continuously is how you eventually figure out the best course of action to win in a more emergent fashion.

And my issue is that often when you hear people talking about strategy, and the need for clarity in having one, it is not so clear what they actually mean…

• Are you looking for articulating a sense of direction?

• Are you rather trying to figure out a more precise articulation of a problem or a challenge to solve?

Or…

• Are you looking for guidance on what/where to focus on, where do we want to play and where not?

• Are you rather looking for a sense of a plan of attack, on how we want to play in the next X time frame (what matters most, or prioritization)?

Being not naturally the best at using precise language, obviously even worse when not in my native language, this is something I learned to value much more through time:

The need for clarity and shared understanding on what we mean when we say something, like strategy, that may mean different things to different people and in context.

This wasn't about getting to solutions or ways forward, but rather about exploring a bit more the problem space. I do hope in any case this was somehow insightful, to get you thinking on the relevance of that additional clarity on what strategy might mean, depending on the context and the actors involved.

Perhaps the next time you are involved in a conversation that is referring recurrently to strategy, you might choose deliberately to ask a couple of clarifying questions so that there is more of a shared understanding on what you are trying to achieve by talking about it…

• Is it a matter of where we should be headed (sense of direction)?

• Is it a matter of achieving a goal (challenge/problem)?

• Or rather a matter of reducing uncertainty by defining focus (areas to play and not to play), or how you go about selection/choice?

• Or still a matter of clarifying, what are our assumptions about choice and selection for some agreed upon time frame (prioritization)?

I would expect that to be quite liberating - although potentially quite painful as a process, if there wasn't enough clarity on anyone's mind to start with…