Strategic Intent - Frame Your Objectives to Unlock the Power of Your Team

Why This Matters

We are all on a journey. In life and at work, we survey the landscape that rolls out before us, imagine a better future, struggle through charting a course forward, and – often – overlook putting the objective or the means of accomplishing it into words. By setting an objective, naming it, wrestling it to the ground through deep thought and debate, and clearly articulating it, we create the conditions for future success in our lives, our teams, and our companies. We also create opportunities for those around us to participate in the challenge, make the tactical decisions to achieve the goal, and build the skills they need to manage through discomfort, ambiguity, and setbacks.?

Defined

Strategic intent is a clear and compelling statement of an organization's long-term aspirations and direction related to a particular objective or problem domain. It outlines the overarching goals and purpose of a strategy in a way that inspires and guides decision-making at all levels. This concept emphasizes setting ambitious goals that go beyond incremental improvements and drives the organization towards a significant and meaningful future state. It must strike a balance between specificity of objective with flexibility of implementation. For execution towards the goal, it must empower the people closest to the problem to make decisions local to their perspective and expertise.?

What This Means for Teams

Strategic intent should impel people forward toward a specific objective. Teams and their local leaders must first work to understand the intent and then operate as decision owners of the aspect of the problem closest to their responsibility. When moving urgently towards the objective, it is a waste of time and a diminishment of accountability to run all decisions up the flagpole. To avoid unintentionally creating a risk averse organization of permission-seekers, leaders must ensure teams are trained, incentivized, and rewarded for taking the initiative.??

Key Elements

1. What is it??It describes a specific goal bracketed in time: Strategic intent focuses on goals beyond those that can be managed through short term tactics and targets. It articulates where the organization aims to be in the future relative to a specific window of time in a given problem domain.It is directional: It must provide a clear sense of direction without prescribing detailed actions.
2. How is it different? It should be ambitious, inspiring, and differentiated: As a statement of long-term goals it should be ambitious and inspiring, motivating the organization to strive to exceed its current capabilities in a particular domain. It describes the resulting state of the world and how this creates differentiation or advantage for the organization, the product, or the company.
3. How does it shape behavior and action?Drives decision making: Like all statements of strategy, it serves as a guide for decision-making at all levels. It should align all actions and choices with the objective.Guiding principles: In support of driving decision making, it frames up the guiding principles or ethos that shape decision making and behavior. These principles help maintain consistency in actions and decisions across different levels of the organization. Doing this with the organizational ethos in mind keeps team behavior bound within the core principles of the company.Centralized objective-setting, decentralized execution. It drives ownership of “the how” down and across. It creates an opportunity for team leaders and individuals across the organization to take initiative and own their local methods of achieving the goal.Leaves room for adaptation: Strategy and plans inevitably run headlong into the headwinds of reality. The team must be able to adapt quickly when they discover and learn their way through solving a problem. Hacking a quote from Clausewitz, "three quarters of the factors on which action… is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty."
4. How do people understand it??Must be communicable: It must be easily understood at every level of the organization. It helps people understand what direction you have decided to take, why this is the best direction, and what the achievement of that objective accomplishes for the broader organization.Multimodal: It must be presented in writing and supported by briefing and Q&A with the team.

Role of Leadership Communications

Effective communication of strategic intent is crucial. The role of a leader is to articulate and disseminate strategic intent throughout the organization. Subordinate managers must work to understand strategy and translate or frame it so it makes sense locally – and then reframe it as the situation evolves.? Individuals across the team are responsible for understanding this and pushing back if there is a lack of clarity. When it comes to important topics in any org, remember Claude Shannon’s foundational take on transmitting information clearly. Redundancy is necessary to deliver information reliably, especially in noisy, chaotic, or busy environments. Redundancy reinforces reliability: restate and reframe!?

Example

This example comes out of an initiative I kicked off with my team last year.?

Pulling Quality Upstream - The engineering organization will invest in quality efforts as far as possible upstream from production, from inception and ideation through the software product life cycle in order to improve developer satisfaction and deliver a better product for our customers. Teams will reallocate effort from other development activities to include quality steps earlier in the cycle. Each team member will leverage their strong local knowledge of their code areas, apply an ownership mindset, and consider the broad-reaching side effects of their work through more rigorous quality practices in advance of code cut-off prior to release planning. We will measurably improve the quality of our product and, through this, increase the reliability of our release cadence, build credibility with the business, and speed up our long-run average delivery velocity.?

Historical Origins of Strategic Intent

I borrowed the concept of strategic intent from the notion of “leader’s intent,” when reading Call Sign Chaos, a leadership book by Jim Mattis disguised as an autobiographical story of his civilian and military service experience.?

Reaching much further back, military history shows this idea has a long and strong pedigree. It originates from a rethinking of military strategy during the Enlightenment in the 17th century. The ideals of individualism and rationality caused a re-evaluation of rigid hierarchy and the need for flexibility in command. Enlightenment ideas virally spread across the European continent, highly influencing leaders like Frederick the Great of Prussia and Napoleon Bonaparte. Both were singular visionary strategists who initiated massive political and military reforms and communicated broad goals rather than detailed orders. This approach allowed their staff to adapt to situations as things unfolded. Staff officers were trained to take the initiative. Since both leaders also shifted from social class-based promotion to a meritocracy, this created a direct incentive for subordinate officers to seize initiative in battle.??

The legendary Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz was heavily influenced by both of these leaders. He absorbed the prevailing ideas of flexibility, individual initiative, and the importance of understanding the broader strategic objectives beyond the immediate tactics of the battlefield. His seminal yet unfinished work on military theory On War emphasizes that the 'fog of war' and unpredictability in military conflict underscores the necessity for leaders to communicate their strategic intent clearly, allowing subordinates to adapt to changing circumstances. His foundational concept, that “war is the continuation of politics by other means," captures the essence of strategic intent in military operations. It highlights the importance of aligning military actions with the overarching political objectives of the state.?

Today’s Software Strategists??

Just as military leaders communicated broad goals to empower decision-making on the battlefield, software managers today set clear strategic visions for their teams. Understanding and articulating the overarching objectives of projects or organizational goals provides a guiding north star, enabling teams to align their efforts and make informed decisions even in rapidly changing environments, overcoming “the fog of execution,” reducing decision drag, and developing the next generation of our leaders. ?