The word “strategy” gets tossed around quite a bit, but there is often a lot of confusion about what a strategy is.  So how do we determine what a strategy really is?  One way is to figure out what it does, and then back up and figure out what it needs to have in order to do what it does.

Strategies accomplish something

when most people talk about strategies, they are talking about something that they have designed in order to help themselves, their company, their unit, their team, to become rich, to grow their company, to take hill 54, or to win a championship.  But what elements help to ensure the achievement of that something?

A Strategy has at least one goal bigger than itself

only a foolish General builds a strategy designed to help his people strategize.  Instead, he builds one designed to win a war, to take a hill, to recover ground.

A Strategy has clear objectives

in order to reach a bigger goal, a strategy must always include a series of smaller objectives which, when achieved, will lead to success in reaching the bigger goal.  A good CEO doesn’t just set a goal to increase profits and let her team loose.  Instead, she sets more specific objectives to lower production costs or find supply chain efficiencies which, if achieved, will help in reaching the bigger goal.

Objectives have clear tasks

in order to achieve objectives, a strategy must always include practical tasks, assigned to real people.  Rather than telling his team to work toward the objective of improving scoring, a good coach defines specific tasks that will lead to success in that objective.  “Larry, you shoot from the outside.  Robert, you post up on the inside.”

Objectives have measures

objectives are like scientific hypotheses.  Unless you can measure them, they’re never going to inform anyone’s actual actions.  The CEO who never sets some sort of measure by which the team can determine whether or not they are achieving their objective of lowering production costs is like a ship’s captain who never checks a compass to determine how far off-course he is.

Strategies change

the General who revisits his strategy once a year doesn’t stay a General for long.  Instead, a good General checks his people’s progress towards objectives, and changes tasks based on the results.  The really good General actually adapts his people’s objectives – and sometimes even the bigger goal – when the situation changes.

Strategies are enacted

strategies are mostly a shared discipline and state of mind for a given group of people. For it to really operate as a strategy, though, this state of mind must be enacted in the world through the actions of those people.  A good strategist knows that the strategy she considers to be her best is really her worst if it does not turn into action.

Strategies are shared

a strategy for a group or an organization which exists in the heads of a few people is not really a strategy, because it cannot be enacted effectively.  Every member of the basketball team needs to know the strategy before they can execute on that strategy.  A great coach uses a clipboard to simplify that strategy down to a few X’s and O’s so that her players have a shared mental image of the strategy on which they can then act.  Without that shared mental image, the strategy is just an idea.

(some) Strategies are Collaboratively Generated

most of the above examples have a distinctly top-down feel to them.  The leader sets the strategy, the people enact it.  This has been part of organizational practice for many years now, for reasons beyond the scope of this post.  More and more the really really great strategist acts as the guardian of the strategy, but not the only one generating it.  She is merely the person who helps her group, her organization, her team to collectively generate, then act on, their shared objectives in order to reach some shared bigger goal.

So..

While these things seem obvious at first glance, many (perhaps most) strategies lack one or more of these elements. For example, some strategies have no way to measure the success of their objectives, making it impossible for an organization to learn what does and does not work.  Other strategies never change, leading an entire organization to continually put their resources and time toward completely wrong efforts.  Still other strategies lack specific tasks assigned to real people, which means that no actual action will take place.

The good news is that adding these simple elements into a strategy can radically affect the outcomes of your efforts. The better news is that a strategy can be as detailed or as simple as is needed.  Some, in fact, can be distilled down and represented as a one-page strategy map – a method SociaLens recommends for most of its clients.

Further Reading

• Wikipedia entry on Strategy: wikipedia article
• Art of War, by Sun Tzu: wikipedia entry , full text
• Kaplan, R. S., & Norton, D. P. (2004). Strategy maps: Converting intangible assets into tangible outcomes. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.: Amazon
• Senge, P. M. (2006). The Fifth Discipline.

• (..and many more.  contact us if you are interested)