Preamble

I have worked with several agencies, consulted independently for 20 years, and held full-time roles at numerous organizations, big and small, creating and executing business and product strategies that have led to success and meaningful growth.

What makes a good strategy?

A good strategy clearly defines what would give you a competitive advantage, identifies the obstacles ahead, and then sets goals and guidelines for the team with clear methods, behaviours, and procedures to achieve them. One of the main ways to help translate this tactically for teams is to illustrate how the guidelines connect their individual goals to advancing the strategic objectives. There are several intuitive ways to create a strategy organically and with far less effort, along with pitfalls to avoid.

That’s my own, wordy definition. If that’s too much to take in at once, I also quite like the author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt’s words of wisdom on the subject:

“The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.”

“Mistaking goals for strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles.”

Quotes via Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

Breaking it down

A good strategy should help you say no. It aims to help you overcome specific problems, hone your focus, and narrow the scope of what concerns you. It does so by getting specific with strong opinions that are loosely held. A good strategy hypothesizes about what will get you where you want to go, but it doesn’t dictate. It’s open and inviting to new information and change.

The opposite is then true for a bad strategy.

A bad strategy is vague, lengthens and complicates decision-making, and therefore leads to more distractions, breadth, and less depth in what matters. Bad strategy is often directive, lacks agility and adaptability, and leaves teams unclear about how they should execute it.

Hallmarks of good strategy

• A good strategy is decisive. It should make clear, hard choices and accept the consequences. A vague strategy that can easily be distorted into saying yes to everything is going to cause more harm than good. A good strategy should help you say no, leading to increased focus and less breadth.
• A good strategy provides a precise diagnosis, clearly defining the core challenge by simplifying complexity into a comprehensible narrative. This should be a diagnosis (not a description) that dives into the problems and challenges faced.
• A good strategy should have a guiding policy, an overall approach and direction for addressing the challenge without dictating every specific action. This is part of how it helps you say no to things—kind of like an “If this, then that” framework.
• More difficult, a clear strategy is candid, meaning it acknowledges hard truths. It should address the most challenging aspects of your situation, bringing them into the open. If your strategy consists only of fluffy or vague words, it won’t be effective.
• A good strategy is clear on a ladder of accountability. It establishes a system for holding individuals and the organization accountable for executing. It does so by identifying high-level objectives, breaking them down into measurable goals for individual teams, and providing clear operating methods for achieving them. This helps identify when any one part of that system is not performing.
• A good strategy is one that those who will execute on it understand and feel bought into. A good strategy is not a struggle for the teams making it happen to understand. The team should be bought in, and the easiest way to make that happen is by collaborating with the team to create it.

Pitfalls

If you follow my writing, you already know the two main pitfalls I will cite when it comes to strategy creation: Swinging a MISS and seeing SPOTS. These two acronyms have become maxims for my career, and a large part of the success I have had. Let me break them down for you.

Swinging a MISS

Made In a Silo or Self-righteously (MISS) is a surefire way to have your strategy not land well with the team or stakeholders, to cause confusion, misalignment, and other issues. This is the number one thing I see that causes leadership teams to fail in strategy and many other things.

As long as siloed heroics persist, where a big reveal occurs without involving key stakeholders in the strategy's creation, you will swing a MISS. You must accept that you don’t know everything and that good strategy needs to be pressure-tested, poked, and prodded. This is also why I think sales and marketing professionals often fail or struggle in strategic roles—they’re accustomed to siloing away and making a big reveal to wow people. That doesn’t work in high-stakes strategy. This is how you end up with what Richard Rumelt calls “fluff masking an absence of substance.”

“A hallmark of true expertise and insight is making a complex subject understandable. A hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity—a flurry of fluff masking an absence of substance.”

via Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

The primary individuals who will operationalize and execute your strategy should be included as collaborators at key stages in its development. Feedback after the fact is not collaboration. If you try to make a strategy by yourself, you’re already doing it wrong.

The extra danger of a reveal

I’ve worked with many groups that have done big reveals and think they’ve gone swimmingly, only to discover days, weeks, or months later that everyone is confused or had critical feedback. Because that’s the thing with a big reveal—people feel like it’s finished, or they don’t want to bring down others present, so they don’t give you any meaningful feedback. If you present something with emotion, firmness, or surprise to people, they don’t understand how it was made, why decisions were made, or how it will be applied, because they haven’t been a part of any of those discussions. And the vast majority of them will remain silent, and you’ll begin to experience turbulence as it’s naturally uncovered that they didn’t get it or just aren’t engaged in what you made. Engagement and understanding are built much more effectively together than suddenly born in a big bang.

Seeing SPOTS

If you don’t consistently refer back to your strategy, carefully craft the guidelines for its execution, refer back to it and ensure it’s acted upon, or collect feedback on it and remain adaptable, then you will see SPOTS. Strategic Plans left On The Shelf. This acronym highlights how many leaders see their strategic plans fail simply because they share them once and never revisit them, or because they fail to put together a cohesive set of guidelines for execution.

I see some teams think they’ve put enough effort into strategic execution guidelines, but wonder why they fail. More often than not, it’s just that they made things too vague, and the team didn’t understand how to use the strategy to inform their work. A vague strategy isn’t meaningful and won’t help the team make decisions. A good strategy takes hard stances on key problems the organization and teams are facing.

Hallmarks of bad strategy

And questions to ask to help you avoid it.

Strategy creation tips

If you’ve understood the previous sections, these tips should already stand out on their own, but let’s hammer it in anyway.

• The best way to get your team to understand and buy into your strategy is to collaborate with them in its creation.
• Get familiar with competitors and take hard stances on how to differentiate. If what you’re making sounds like it could be a competitor’s, then you haven’t taken a hard enough stance.
• Ensure you’re creating value for all of the key business areas: Customers, suppliers, and employees.
• Avoid statements of desire; instead, focus on how you’ll overcome obstacles.
• Trust the experts on your teams. Pull out subject-matter knowledge, primarily known unknowns and risks, and use it to inform your strategy.
• Stress test how easy it is to make strategic decisions through the lens of your strategy. If teams have to ask for help, it may not be ready.
• Support your strategy with clear frameworks for decision-making, delivery, and other team behaviours you want to see, as well as those you don’t.
• Avoid vagueness at all costs. Said again and again: a promising strategy must take hard stances, which means it is also specific and clear.
• One of the surest ways to fail in strategy creation is to do it in a silo and then do a big reveal.
• You need measurable goals, as well as straightforward, easy ways to collect those measurements. You cannot manage what you cannot measure.
• When measurements and other new information start to come in, you need clear methods of adapting the strategy. Strategy is not static; it must evolve.

Conclusions

I hope some small insight here unlocks something for you. My biggest advice, of course, remains to never do strategy in a silo and to ensure you have clear guidelines to help execute on it. I’ll share more of my thoughts on strategy and planning soon.