Befuddled by strategy? It's time for a holiday...
Christian Pratt
Commercially-focused marketing and communications for SMEs | Leadership ?? Strategy ?? Practical Stuff | Sorts out the details while seeing the bigger picture ? | Chartered Marketer ?? FCIM | ?? open to work
Objective, strategy, tactics. Objective, strategy, tactics...
If you hang out on LinkedIn long enough, or you’ve completed any meaningful management training or qualification, you won’t need me to explain the purpose, merit and value of this well-known planning triumvirate. Its importance is taken as read. Yet our timelines are continually populated with post and infographics and articles (mea culpa), all expounding the importance of strategy and why having one will help you and your organisation become immeasurably better.
Yet I suspect something’s amiss. This repetition of explanation is surely the smoking gun of misunderstanding? From what I can see, confusion and incomprehension bubble to the surface whenever the S word is mentioned. Circumstantially, I'd wager that many people pretend to understand strategy but, privately, remain unsure.
Strategy
Never has a corporate word been overused by so many whilst being understood by so few. (With apologies to Winston Churchill, who was – ironically – a great strategist.)
The thing is, though, you do know what strategy is and you do know how to develop one and apply it. That knowledge and practice is hiding in plain sight. For strategy is just a fancy way of saying choice. Or, more accurately, choosing to do a specific thing.
OK, time to unpack my assertion and provide an explanation. Time for a holiday. You and the family haven’t been properly away since lockdown, and the idea of some beach time / mountain time / foreign culture is really appealing. The question comes up over breakfast:
What are we going to do for our summer holidays?
Straight off, we have our objective: decide how to spend our time and money this summer. It’s so obvious it hardly needs to be SMART: kick back, get away and have a great time. You’ll know what good looks like and whether you’ve achieved it. Quickly, the conversation turns to specifics. Around the table, ideas are easily shared:
Straight away you have a list. Holiday options. Choices. Later in the day, as brains whirr and other ideas emerge, the list gets longer:
Plenty of options. Lots of choice.
Spoiler: these are all strategies
Surprise! Each and every one of these ideas, these suggestions, is a reasonable strategic response to the objective; a way of meeting the requirement for some summer holidaying. Granted, not every option optimises the fun; the midges might bite in Scotland, and the drive down to the Auvergne is long, likely hot and probably boring. But they’re all valid options nonetheless. Summer holiday options. Holiday strategies.
And now you need to make a decision; a choice. The key thing here – the absolutely key thing about ‘doing’ strategy – is that you:
It’s tempting, of course, to have your cake and eat it. To have two weeks in Greece AND a mini-break in Paris. But the wise holiday planner knows that when picking the best strategy, the best option, they must simultaneously discard the remaining possibilities. Why? Because to mix your strategies is to compromise their likely outcomes, and to risk missing the objective. Crucially, the tactics needed to implement ‘Greece’ are necessarily different to ‘Dorset’. Booking flights and a taxi for the family to get to Rhodes will not help you get to Christchurch. Literally.
This is a good time to reminder ourselves that tactical mixes are uniquely associated with specific strategies. They’re not generic; you can’t repeatedly use the same set of tactics regardless of your strategy (such as always booking flights to Copenhagen), irrespective of where you're actually going on holiday. And if you try to spread yourself across more than one holiday, you’ll end up compromising both (and using the wrong tactics, to boot).
Importantly, that holiday choice should match your familial means and needs. What’s actually more important? Finishing the kitchen or seeing our friends? How much can we afford to spend on flights? Will the car make it to the South of France?
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Enough of the holidays. What about work?
If we re-frame things and consider our corporate objectives instead, your choice of strategy should be framed by a variety of factors. One popular model, a way to quickly evaluate the suitability of each option, is the 3C model: customer, competitor, company:
There are plenty of other ways to evaluate strategic merit. (Google is your friend.) Above all, though, you’re seeking to select the most suitable option. Narrowing down your choices to settle on the option – the single best strategy – that will most effectively enable you to achieve your objective. As Mark Ritson is want to say: be choiceful. Think carefully about how you can best meet your objective. Choose wisely.
Tactics last, not first
And so, once more, tactics. With your choice made, the tactical mix should largely fall into place. You might need to add one or two unfamiliar tactics; you might need a new combination of old tactics. You may, in fact, be on broadly familiar tactical territory, already reaching for the easyJet app on your phone, or the booking.com website on your tablet. Each set of holiday plans will always comprise a unique mix of tactics. Just remember that you never go near the tactics (choosing them and then actually doing them) until you've made your strategic choice. (It's foolish to book the ferry to Oslo before deciding you're going to holiday in Vienna.)
Whichever which way, having chosen your strategy you now know what you’re doing (organising camping in the Auvergne) and why (to have a long overdue catch-up and chill out with your friends), and how (ferry; car insurance; campsite; flipflops). Sorted.
When all's said (and possibly not done)
In the end, I believe it’s the S word, not the process, that seems to cause confusion, bemusement and a general waste of corporate time and effort. How about this then? If you’re still getting stuck on strategy, why not re-brand the whole shooting match? Perhaps we simply need to use language that we're more familiar with. Less business jargon, more vernacular. So why not replace:
Objective – Strategy – Tactics
with:
Aim – Options – Actions ?
To wit:
One aim; several options (and a decision), plus a bunch of specific actions. AOA.
At the end of the day, a strategy is nothing more than 'the best option, chosen'. We’re all strategists now. Happy holidays!
*Thank you, Michael Porter
Head of Marketing at Notpla, working to make plastic a thing of the past.
1 年Currently sat in the airport lounge starting the relaxed couples holiday to Lisbon after a few days in Barcelona with friends… looks like I’ve fallen at the first hurdle of strategy ??. This is fab Christian! The chat we had, using a similar analogy of travel choices to Scotland always acts as a handy little reminder.
Co-founder & Marketing Tinkerer | PowerPoint Design Agency, Presented.
1 年I do like an action point!
I help B2B businesses define their unique brand strategy, story & style. Head of Strategy at Fellowship l Board Member at Cambridgeshire Community Foundation.
1 年As you say, lots of people struggle with strategy. Along with terms such as brand, differentiation and distinctiveness, it has become devalued thanks to a plethora of different definitions and interpretations. While I like your holiday analogy, I'm not sure 'Options' quite captures what is meant by Strategy. Neither does 'Choices' on its own. My favourite definition of strategy is Mark Pollard's - "An informed opinion about how to win". My favourite illustration of OST is Objective: retrieve Helen, Strategy: deception, Tactic: wooden horse. And my favourite illustration of the strategy process comes from the nearly 50 years old JWT Planning Guide, which remains full of sound advice https://plannersphere.pbworks.com/f/JWTPlanningGuide.pdf Hope that helps rather than confuses!