Good Strategy
The modern definition of 'strategy' is straight forward: A plan of action designed to achieve something.
Nobody wants to spend weeks, or tens of thousands of dollars, on a to-do list that is largely ignored after the expensive strategic planning process. The element that's missing from the definition is the leverage, the success factor that makes a strategy good.
What is it about one set of actions versus another, or in light of the real-worl challenges you face, that makes a strategy compelling and more likely to succeed?
Bridges Business Consultancy has been conducting a survey on strategy for the last 14 years. The latest engaged 144 leaders (92% from C-suite) businesses.
Various sources can show you that 60-90% of startups fail within the first few years (Pic #1, Pic #2). In a 2009 survey (so a bit outdated) after survying 1,546 business executives McKinsey & Company reported that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support.
We also know that business and government continue 'as usual' despite these failure rates – through effort, overtime, debt, and because the majority of their competitiion are performing at the same level of mediocrity.
Harvard Business Review explores some of the failures of strategic planning in their article the big lie of strategic planning. They write" The subtle slide from strategy to planning occurs because planning is a thoroughly doable and comfortable exercise"
Government departments need some form of strategy which often include or reference their logic models, program activity architectures, etc. Many businesses have some sort of strategic plan (even if it is only an articulation of a broad set of goals and objectives.
Bad strategy can be the result miscalculation. The reality is that government and business leaders are dealing with complex problems and many competing forces. We are not always going to get it right every time. Bad strategy is also (more often) the result of a failure to commit the time and effort to developing a good strategy, and a failure in leadership to make hard choices between competing values and risks or to favour positive thinking versus brutal realism.
Richard Rumelt's book "Good strategy Bad Strategy" (with a nice summary posted by Jeff Zych here) explores some of the key elements of good and bad strategy. He identifies the following four hallmarks of a bad strategy:
It’s a confusion between strategy and visions, values, goals, objectives, and motivational talks. superficial restatements of the obvious combined with a generous sprinkling of buzzwords. Fluff masquerades as expertise, thought and analysis.
A strategy is a way through a difficulty, a response to a challenge. If the challenge is not defined, it is difficult or impossible to develop a good strategy. If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you dont have a strategy. You have a goal or a wishlist.
Describing a destination is no substitute for a real strategy on how to get there. Visions, missions and goals are a part of the strategic planning process, best served by developing a comprehensive strategy that allows your teams to be agile and adaptive as things evolve.
Blue sky objectives are oversimplified statements. A long list of “things to do” where teams discuss what they need to accomplish, throw the initiatives onto a long list called a “strategic plan” and apply the label “long-term” to anything that doesn't need to be done in the next month.
A good diagnosis is critical. You need to simplify the overwhelming complexity of reality to articulate the central or critical aspects of a situation.
Leverage. Rumfelt describes the second principle as a "guiding policy" that governs the overall approach chosen to overcome the challenges identified in the diagnosis. For us, the root of this is leverage. You need to understand what levers of change will work for your organization facing a specific set of challenges.
Coherent and cohesive actions and resources needed to alter how your team operates to address them. These are feasible steps, resource commitments, actions that are coordinated with one another to work together to move your levers.
It is ultimately about the “fit” between external forces (the client or customer, market forces, competition, etc) the leadership and decision-making that chooses your course of action, and the internal team activities doing the work. Which means:
"Good strategy is design, and design is about fitting pieces together so they work as a coherent whole."
– Richard RumeltThe core of strategy is identifying and solving problems. It is a hypothesis that can be tested and refined over time. Designing a good strategy – like designing a policy, program, product or solution – requires a good process, one that engages a diverse group of people from the designer to the "end user".
You need to understand the context and ask good questions in a process that allows you to aggregate ideas into a coherent collective picture. Designing a good strategy is a process you repeat, review and redo - turning ideas and problems into solutions people want that you are capable of delivering.
