Lessons on intentionally backward strategy from a big wooden horse

I often like to think about the opposite of what the conventional thinking is. For example, when was the last time you read a strategic document that started by saying ‘We are absolutely not, under any circumstances, going to do x, and here are the reasons’. This seems strange to me. After all, isn’t choosing what we’re going to sacrifice at the heart of strategy? And, wouldn’t being explicit about what we’re not going to do, make the thing we are going to do, more likely to actually happen?

Why we should worry more about the strategy execution gap

When we look back on what we’ve done we often find it’s not really what we set out to do. This is to be expected to a degree because the world is ridiculously complicated, constantly changing, and hard to predict. Ultimately strategies are set today with the goal of changing something in the future and are therefore, by their nature, not entirely predictable.

However, the gap between our intended strategy and what really happens also comes from other potentially more controllable factors. For example, in big pharma, strategies generally originate from a global team, say as a global brand plan, and then are rolled down to the country teams, with their execution really happening when the customer sees field teams or materials. This can be like a giant game of Chinese whispers. And, a bit like Chinese whispers the more you try to communicate, and the more complicated the starting message is, the wilder the divergence gets as you move down the communication chain.

You get a sense of the scale of the problem big pharma has in this respect when you see statistics like ‘only 11% of local pharma marketers use more than 50% of global HQ content’ [Data from the Across Health Maturometer]. That’s quite a big gap between global and local, and that’s before you get right to the execution coal face. In that setting, Veeva data says that 77% of pharma content created for field teams is never used. It’s amazing, and I mean crazy amazing, to think that country marketing teams routinely ignore more than half of what Global does, and then the country field teams (the people doing the executing) ignore nearly 80% of what their own country marketing team does. That’s not a strategy execution gap – it’s an enormous chasm.

Minding the gap

In huge companies, there will always be a gap between global strategy and what’s delivered to the local customer. However, being aware of the gap and how ridiculously big it can be, is the first step in doing something about it. If I wanted to be really controversial, I might suggest many pharma companies need to turn themselves upside down and make their customer-facing teams the most important, most respected, and most valued employees. Ultimately pharma company value only really comes from inventing amazing medicines, ensuring there is access to them, and ensuring HCPs know which patients will benefit most from them.

And yet, typically field teams are at the very bottom of the communication chain. Even though they literally know the customers – by name in many cases – and even though they are the most effective tool pharma has for growing prescriptions, they hardly input into anything – and certainly not the global strategy. They aren’t part of the process, they don’t input into the materials, and so it’s perhaps not a big surprise that Veeva data shows that in more than 60% of their calls, they don’t use any marketing content at all.

Changing that is hard. Because turning organisations upside down isn’t going to happen anytime soon, an alternative is to think about strategy in a back-to-front way – from the point of execution with the customer back up.

What a big wooden horse tells us about backward thinking

One of the very first things I remember learning when I joined the agency world was a little anecdote about strategy, objectives, and tactics using the story of Helen of Troy.

The Greek objective is to get Helen back

Their tactic is the Trojan Horse

And their killer strategy is to deceive the defenders into opening the gates.

It’s a lovely little anecdote but it also highlights our need to be seen to be strategic. It suggests there was a well-considered ‘strategic’ process at play. That Odysseus carefully selected his favourite McKinsey-inspired strategic planning process to develop the idea:

• That he started with 10 slides of data-driven analysis, using infographics to show why years of battering the walls with thousands of men had failed
• Then he pulled these insights through into a strategic map beautifully visualising Helen as the objective, the ‘big wall’ as the problem, and ‘deception’, as the killer strategy that would deliver victory
• After that he presented a neat table of possible deception tactics
• And finished it all off with a prioritised impact feasibility matrix, risk analysis, and ROI calculation.

But of course, he didn’t do this. He knew the Trojans held horses sacred – he made a creative leap – that there was a reasonable chance they might keep a really big wooden one as a trophy. And, from the tactical idea, which is the bit everyone remembers, he worked back to the details of the deception – sailing the fleet off, hiding men inside, etc.

A big wooden lesson

The lesson here is that Odysseus was most focused on the interface between the tactic and the audience – in the execution of the strategy. Given he was going to be inside the horse he had to be confident in the behaviour the horse would drive.

I think we often lose this in huge strategy decks. For example, having reviewed many, many pharma brand plans, there’s almost never a slide that directly connects the steps on the customer’s adoption ladder, with the messages and tactics designed to move a customer up it. Instead, there is a mass of research, insights, and data upfront, followed by a typically vague positioning statement, some generic KPIs – that are oddly similar in every plan for every brand – then a messaging architecture, and a single slide of one-word tactics.

I’m not saying we don’t need all the analysis or that we get everything wrong – we don’t. However, the thing that is instrumental to delivering a change from the customer should be at the front in bold.

Some practicalities of intentionally backward strategy

1. Start at the end. Thinking about the specific change you want from the people in the audience (which could be customers, employees, shareholders, the Trojans etc) is a powerful way to ensure you know both the objective and the behaviours your new direction will deliver.
2. Make it clear what you’re not doing. Strategy is about choices. Strategy execution gaps appear partly from a lack of clarity around what choices are really being made. For example, the global team might decide that globally a first-line positioning is the way forward. That may not be possible in some countries due to access constraints which sort of gives permission to do anything. Making it clear that Global absolutely does not want communication focussing on the third-line setting is helpful because it gives more clarity on the priorities.
3. Keep it simple. The more slides there are, the more you say, the more rational you give, the more the really important bits get hidden. Most people reading a strategy document are doing so because they are going to be executing it. So, get the stuff about how the tactic is going to drive a change up the front. If you want to evidence why it’s a good idea with 75 slides of analysis put them at the back. And, where possible have a strategy on a page option that can be sent to everyone that makes it clear what you want them to do.

Making change, not strategy, happen

The thing I love most about what I do is when we as an agency client partnership make change happen. Almost always that change comes from getting people to think or behave in different ways by delivering stuff – meetings, materials, adverts, websites etc. Great stuff to me is always the hero. It directly connects our strategic choices about where to play and how to win to the human we want to do the changing.

Yes, the strategy sets the direction for all that stuff, it helps us decide what to sacrifice to have the best chance of achieving more success. However, when it gets overly complex, overly clever, and overly long, it stops being helpful. So, as a person who has the word ‘Strategy’ in his job title, it seems appropriate to suggest the lesson we take from Troy is that the tactic is the hero – not the strategy. So, let’s celebrate the tactics and their impact a lot more, let’s include the people closest to the customers, and let’s worry a bit less about trying to prove how strategic we are.