**Steps on to soapbox.**
I’m getting a little tired of the entrepreneurs and the would-be business coaches/consultants that are minimizing the importance of strategy. I keep bumping into claims that business plans and strategic plans are a waste of time. A waste of time? Why are entrepreneurs just sprinting to a MVP? Is it because iterating makes you feel like your business is doing something?
I’m all for minimum viable products but that doesn’t mean your work shouldn’t be thoughtful, deliberate, and value-creating. Lately objections to competitive strategy I’ve been getting are when someone from this camp claims that their lean strategic approach is the only way to deal with the volatility/uncertainty/complexity/ambiguity of today’s marketplace. (That’s the VUCA acronym for all my strat-nerds out there.) I believe, not always but most of the time, entrepreneurs are using this kind of strategy argument as a cop-out.
What?!
I get it. It’s fun to tinker. Strategic thinking takes time, research, and is a little unsexy sometimes. Not to mention the need to be consistent and systematic with how your firm makes decisions. I’m 100% for “failing fast and failing often” but I guess I would add “failing deliberately” to those first two fail prefixes. Why “failing deliberately”? Because it means you tested something specifically, collected some data, and made a choice. Here are four steps, concentric circles, or tips about how you should frame strategy.
Strategy at its core is about making choices. Planning is great but it’s the actions that are taken after everyone agrees on the plan that really matters. There’s a very real breakdown that happens when you come up with the plan and then never do the work to realize the goals or <insert success metric>. There’s also a lot of power in choosing what not to do. Channel your inner economics student/professor and try to remember all those talks about opportunity costs. It’s real and it’s a thing.
When you take a step back from the core it’s about understanding how your business is positioned in its market. This is where your business’ malleability and your market’s predictability get pulled in. How quickly can you continue to align yourself with the tastes and expectations of your target market? Do you even know who your target market is and why they should engage with you? How are your competitors reacting to the choices you’re making? Are you really getting the most out of your supply chain? Immediate follow-up answer: Yes, every business (even solo-service-providing-consultant-freelancers) has a supply chain.
Another step back from that should be around how you are communicating with your stakeholders. Anyone that is engaging with you or that you want to be engaging with is a stakeholder. Why should they listen to you? Why should they care? Your strategies success hinges on your ability to tell a story that matters. It’s that story that will drive your actions, the actions of your employees and even the actions of your customers. You need to be able to communicate in a way that makes them feel like their roles matter. Engaging with you matters. Buying your product or service matters (and also provides lots and lots of value).
The last step back has to do with planning. Planning is part of strategy. Planning is NOT strategy. Planning also isn’t perfect. It’s hard to predict the future, it’s a volatile world out there. It’s important that you think of planning as a way of surveying a landscape. It’s a way of taking stock of what you have, all the “stuff” that makes your business work. You’re looking at things like capabilities, talent, money, time, social media celebrity status and trying to organize them in a way that will get your business to achieving it’s goals in terms of mission and profitability. What comes from planning is a framework for making choices and a way to evaluate those choices as you go.
Strategy is an interesting mix of science and art. It’s also hard and scary sometimes. A good strategy will push us to be a little uncomfortable and as Malcolm Gladwell says a little disagreeable. That’s where strategy differs from planning - the act of doing something! Making choices systematically can be tough and not always what you think running a business should feel like. I’ll end borrowing from Roger Martin encouraging you to make deliberate decisions around deciding where to play and how to win as you’re trying to get the most out of strategy.
**Steps off soapbox.**
If you're still stuck or wondering how you can start to make better choices in practice right now you can download a FREE resource I made for just this occasion. It's called the Disruptive Decision Framework and all you have to do is sign up and I will hand deliver a copy to your inbox.