Being Strategic

Somebody I coach was recently told by his boss, “You need to be more strategic.” What a juicy rebuke. Here are some of my thoughts about the topic.

First of all, as far as I know, strategy is one of those notions that people have ideas about, but haven’t fully figured out. For example, academics still go back and forth over how to come up with a best possible strategy for any given mission. And, on the corporate marketing front, there are still arguments about what generic strategies are available and smart (strategies like being the low cost provider, or dedicating resources to strengthen unique value to customers, or focusing energies on a specific market segment).

The fact that folks don’t know what makes the ideal strategy, or what makes someone optimally strategic, reveals that strategy is not something one looks up in the dictionary in order to get to the essence. It’s one of those unending explorables. Even the world’s best strategist could think a little further out in time, could see a slightly bigger picture, could have slightly better judgment, and could produce a better strategy.

One thing for sure, a strategy answers the big question, how will success be achieved? It only takes a few juicy bullets to describe a strategy. A strategy assumes a goal and describes the best levers to pull in order to get there and in order to protect against vulnerabilities.

Here’s something I find particularly interesting. I first learned of it through the work of the McGill University professor, Henry Mintzberg. When you ask a person his or her formulated strategy, the answer will almost always be different from the strategy he or she has been executing. This is because, in addition to being something one can think through in advance (and it’s always good to do so), a strategy emerges through rational responses to day-to-day events. So we’re all engaged in strategies but we only see them when we look back in time.

Thus, “being strategic” refers to the disposition to clearly define a goal; to put your finger on activities that get you most quickly and efficiently to that goal; and to anticipate what might go wrong so that you can either pre-empt or effectively respond to it.

Okay, so how does one become “more strategic”? What would that look like if you were a salesperson, for example; or a race horse jockey, or a blog writer, or a leader of thousands?

My answer to that has two parts. First is the list of questions to ask yourself, and things to keep in mind, in order to formulate a strategy. Next there is the list of mental skills that are brought to bear on those questions and considerations.

Here are the questions and considerations; needless to say, we are assuming you have a certain mission for which you are building a strategy.

1) You need to have your values top of mind (e.g., your stance on integrity, compassion, and social responsibility). You need to make sure the strategy you end up with is congruent with these values.
2) Know the variables that are relevant to your mission. For example, is your success a function of what’s happening socially, legally, politically, technologically, competitively, economically, and personally?
3) What are the opportunities and threats you face in your situation? Try to think “big picture”, like you’re taking a snapshot (pretend you’re in a helicopter flying over your mission landscape).
4) Extend your snapshot of how things look today into the future—what’s likely to happen?
5) Define your current strengths, and figure out how to leverage them in order to usurp opportunities, overcome weaknesses, and pre-empt or deal with threats.
6) Assuming you’re mid-stream on the mission, determine your apparent strategy to date (the one that has emerged based on real world events) so you can ask yourself if it has been working for you and what limitations it imposes. Address those limitations and plan to utilize the types of decisions that have been working for you.

Now, how well you do in the above process partly depends on the personal thinking skills you bring to the planning table. My experience is you can put a group of people together with the same mission, offer them all the same questions and considerations, and some folks will come up with a better strategy than others.

Here are what I think are the relevant mental factors: pattern recognition skills (so you can label themes that you come across); creativity (so you can generate new ideas for achieving results through unorthodox means), span of horizon (how far out in time a person thinks), systems orientation (remember the bird’s eye view?—you need to see the landscape you’re playing in as a single snapshot), intuition about people (so you know whose buttons are most easily pressed and whether it’s worth pressing them), ratio insight (in the sense of intuiting “bang for the buck”—where you’ll get the best return on the time you might invest); and, analytical skills.

So, could you be more strategic? Yes. Is it easy? No. Is anybody perfect at it? Nope. But, at least if your boss said you SHOULD be more strategic, now you could build a strategy to improve!