4 Steps to Bring Your Desired Strategy into Action

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Keita Demming, Director Of Development Of Innovation at The Covenant Group. Keita spoke about his latest book, Strategy to Action: Run Your Business Without It Running You, and how to bring strategy from thought into action.

I was once talking to a potential client and I told him, “tell me about your company.” He said to me three times, “we value our people, and we invest in our people. Our people are our number one priority.” So, I asked him, “how much money do you set aside to invest in your people on an annual basis?” He said, “good question. I'm not sure. I don't think we've ever deliberately set aside money for our people.” I asked, “how much time do you set aside to invest in your people on an annual basis?” He responded, “good question. I would have to look into that and get back to you.” I told him, “you’ve said three times that you value your people and you want to invest in them. Yet, you couldn't answer those basic questions. That's a very clear gap. You can tell what people value in two ways: how they spend their time and how they spend their money. If you're not spending time or money on your people, yet you're saying that you value and invest in them, they will begin to resent you, because there's a gap between your intention and your action.”

I see similar stories to this over and over again. People will declare that their company’s whole mission is about one purpose, and yet there is almost always a gap between their stated intentions and their actual actions. So, what can we do to develop our declared mission into an actionable strategy?

1. Set your desired future.

There are four overarching questions that building a desired future comes down to. First, you need to determine what your desired future is. Where do you want to be 5-10 years now? Second, what are you prioritizing right now to ensure that you make that future a reality? Third, how are you creating alignment in your world, so that everything you do from the moment you wake up in the morning to the moment you go to bed, is in service towards your desired future? Finally, where are you allocating your resources to ensure that they go towards supporting your stated desired future? In summary, with each action you take, you need to ask yourself, “is this action in radical service of my desired future?” That's a very profound question to ask yourself, but it is essential to developing a path that will bring your goals into reality.

2. Determine the complexity of the problem.

People often don't understand the nature of the problem that's in front of them. For example, there was once a big problem with rats in Vietnam. Those in power decided to solve this by getting citizens to bring them rat tails in exchange for money. What happened was, people started to breed rats and bring the tails. Once the leaders started to see little rats running around the city with no tails, they realized that people were becoming very entrepreneurial about how to get their reward. Most people will simply look at this as an unintended consequence. I disagree with that notion. The problem was that initially, they assumed that the problem was simple. They thought, “if I do this, then I'll get a particular outcome,” instead of “if I do this, maybe I'll get a particular outcome.” There’s a big difference between “if, then” thinking and “if, maybe” thinking. For simple problems, “if, then” makes a lot of sense. “If I put these three ingredients together, then I can make this recipe.” But, once you introduce complex variables or human beings to a problem, the thinking that gets you ahead is “if, maybe.” The “maybe” piece is where you have to apply strategy. “If we put this new idea in place, maybe we'll be successful.” Now, this mindset takes some thinking and careful analysis to plan and really understand that “we are not 100% sure that this is going to work, but we're pretty confident, given what we know, that if we do this, we will beat our competition.” That’s why you need to determine if you’re dealing with a simple or complex problem.

3. Have conversations.

I like to say that conversation is the action. We can't do anything without first having a conversation with ourselves. “I should move this pen. I should start writing my book.” Self-talk is how we drive behavior. There are three things human beings do better than any other animal on the planet. Our capacity for language, our ability to set goals, and our ability to have shared goals. Those are the three things that make us the only species that has impacted the planet in the way that we have. Those are the fundamental things that have made us able to build skyscrapers in New York or send people to the moon. And you cannot do any of those three things without conversation. That's what I mean by “conversation is the action.” We have to move away from thinking of conversations like machines and trying to get performance from our employees through carrot and stick. The way to get performance is to use conversations to get people to buy into your vision. There is nothing we can accomplish in this world without conversation. Conversation is the heart of every single thing we do.

4. Prepare for the long-term.

Most people fall short of achieving their vision, because they're not prepared to pay the price today for a bigger return tomorrow. To put it simply, if I decide that in order to get in shape, I am not going to have ice cream right now, and that I'm going to have an apple instead, that's a short-term cost for a long-term gain. This is hard to do, especially when the goal is intangible. The more intangible the goal is, the harder time people have paying the upfront costs for it. People are more comfortable with things that are personal, immediate, and certain. They're less comfortable with things that are organized, deferred, and a gamble. Things that are organized, deferred, and a gamble, tend to be the things that redefine and help you make leaps in your life. This brings us full circle, back to Step 1. What are the long-term goals that we can develop to service our desired future? By always thinking ahead towards our desired future, we can ensure that every action we take brings us closer to those long-term gains.