I may have been wrong about strategy
For my second career I worked at consulting firms and agencies. I was a ‘digital strategist’. Companies were just trying to understand social media, really getting serious about their online presences, and were wondering how to move their communications and marketing (and more of their business) online.
I got there at the time where just having a website turned out to be not a digital strategy. There were blogs, mobile and social media to think about. (That a mobile website was separate was the thinking back then). People wanted word of mouth marketing, then social clout, then gamification.
We’d go into people’s offices and say, “Look, your website may exist, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing anything. We can use social media to start driving traffic, giving your brand a voice, and making real fans or advocates for what you do. People who will act when you ask them.”
I was a strategist but I didn’t feel like I was doing strategy. Strategy was supposed to be something like innovative or transformational or visionary. I was just solving problems. We’d go back to the office and spend a bunch of a retainer contract writing tweets and Facebook posts.
But it worked. It was valuable stuff. We were really good at guiding clients through change and growth, looking at new technology and figuring out how best to apply it. Often it was workmanlike. Crafting the content, optimizing, learning and writing more.
I eventually began moving up, doing work with bigger scope. Sometime after strategist was dropped from my title I was writing the vision statements, repositioning brands, clarifying mission. This was real strategy. Right?
Right?
Maybe not. In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy Richard Rumelt takes to task the popular idea of strategy.
Vision isn’t strategy. Goals aren’t strategy. What passes for ‘strategy’ today is usually hopes and dreams or objectives floating untethered from reality.
Bad strategy is long on goals and short on policy or action. It assumes that goals are all you need. It puts forward strategic objectives that are incoherent and, sometimes, totally impracticable. It uses high-sounding words and phrases to hide these failings.
There is a large industry of consultants and book writers who are willing to provide instruction on the delicate differences between missions, visions, strategies, initiatives, and priorities. From small boutiques to the large IT-based firms trying to break into strategy work, consultants have found that template-style strategy frees them from the onerous work of analyzing the true challenges and opportunities faced by the client. Plus, by couching strategy in terms of positives-vision, mission, and values-no feelings are hurt.
This is a hard pill to swallow. I can’t count the number of team meetings and all hands where someone’s asked what’s the strategy when they were looking for charismatic leadership or a transformational vision or motivation.
I do it. I was doing it recently. I built a whole breakdown of how to decompose objectives into product vision and strategy for my products.
A flow chart moving through three major sections with subsections. Starts with Organization objectives and divisional objectives. In “Product Strategy” you have product vision, goals, and outcomes. In Discovery you have opportunities, ideas and solutions. In Delivery you have features and stories.
Vision isn’t strategy. Goals aren’t strategy. What passes for ‘strategy’ today is usually hopes and dreams or objectives floating untethered from reality.
A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision. A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them. And the greater the challenge, the more a good strategy focuses and coordinates efforts to achieve a powerful competitive punch or problem-solving effect.
A good strategy can be identified by articulating a clear diagnosis of the strategic challenge, a guiding policy leading from that problem, and a plan to carry that policy out through coherent actions. What Rumelt calls the “the kernel.”
- Diagnosis: The diagnosis describes what the problem is. Not the full landscape, not the desired future state, but what aspects of the situation are critical.
- Guiding Policy: The guiding policy is how we’re going to deal with the problem or diagnosis. What approach can we take (hopefully something that plays to strengths we possess or can attain) to meet the challenges implied by the diagnosis.
- Coherent Actions: The steps we are going to take to accomplish the guiding policy. These must be coordinated with one another. In harmony with the guiding policy. I’m a communications-oriented person so the vision → mission → strategy framework makes sense to me. It guides someone from what the organization is trying to do to what the person is doing. The kernel idea is not communications oriented, but it really resonates. It’s pragmatic. It focuses on reality — ground truth — every step of the way. In some strategic frameworks strategy can be unmoored from execution, but by pulling a strategy from a clear diagnosis through to coherent actions, you are creating the framework for execution within the strategic exercise itself.
I read Good Strategy/Bad Strategy only recently, and I’m using some of its tools in my strategy work now. When I do, I think back to my work as a strategist, get in that mindset. We’d work to identify really clear problems with achievable solutions. We’d work within our realm of influence to grasp at and get to those solutions. We’d create a suite of services or tactics that all drove to the same end. Sounds like we were doing real strategy.