Strategy vs. strategic planning

Introduction:

It is common to talk about having a strategic plan.

One goes through strategic planning exercises and one consults the strategic plan. However, there is a problem with this common refrain.

A strategy is not a plan.

A strategy is a set of integrated choices that can help you increase focus and apply resources in a way that makes it so that you are more likely to succeed.

Strategy is also a bridge between objectives and productive activities. It is the choices you make on how you are going to reach your objectives.

Planning paralysis

Roger Martin is one of the foremost thought leaders on strategy and he points out that all too often efforts to build a strategy get swept away by the planning aspects of strategic ‘planning’. When that happens it is a missed chance.

There is a real possibility that by focusing on the planning aspects an organization ends up not making any choices.

They just continue what they have always done and the exercise becomes focused on budgeting and keeping what has already been happening moving forward.

The problem with this is that threats are ignored and opportunities missed.

There is a good explanation for this - the sunk cost fallacy.

The sunk cost fallacy is when you give extra weight to the fact that you have already invested so much in the current course of action that it is worth continuing. This is a sort of bias that can delay decision making.

In today’s rapidly changing world the risks of having such a view of strategy are obvious.

Take a disease foundation for example that has a long standing history of funding individual researchers.

When the science behind medical research was simpler, when the immune system was just a black box we did not understand, funding one researcher made sense.

Nowadays the science that underpins medical research is complex. It requires the close knit collaboration of multiple different disciplines.

If a disease foundation continues to focus on individual researchers it misses the opportunity to leverage the funding it has to contribute to something really impactful.

A plan driven by looking at last years budget is likely to mean that the individual researcher grants or their equivalent programs are continued.

Perhaps a good example of structural planning paralysis is a consortium project.

Often consortium projects are brought together under the umbrella of a funding scheme. As part of that funding scheme there has to be a plan that becomes part of the contractual agreement.

The rationale behind funding and setting up a consortium project is that there are challenges that are too difficult and complex for even a small group of organizations to handle.

The nature of complex problems and the projects that endeavor to tackle them is that you often don’t know where you will end up or even what you need to do.

In such a setting how can you set up a plan that will remain relevant for five years?

One could easily argue that if you set up a consortium project to handle a difficult and challenging task and you do exactly what is in the project plan and nothing more either it was not as complex of a problem as you originally thought or you are just going through the motions of the project without delivering anything of real value.

Thinking and renewing your strategy for your consortium project can help break you out of that kind of structural planning paralysis. Yet very few consortium projects make the effort to go through the process of developing and renewing strategy

Only the strategic thrive

Alone the chances that the activities of an individual researcher are going to have any meaningful impact in the short to medium term are miniscule.

Combined with multiple disciplines in a consortium project the activities of a researcher have a real chance to achieve something that makes a real difference.

When you engage in a consortium project you are engaging with others in what is an ambitious endeavor. The more ambitious you are the more complex what you have to do becomes.

The result is there are more choices to be made. This is particularly true when it comes to consortium projects because combined together you and your consortium partners have more potential than you do alone.

Trying to ‘cure’ cancer has many more degrees of freedom that individual researcher focused on a particular pathway.

Being ambitious requires the willingness to make a choice not just a plan.

Furthermore. if what you are working on is complex and changing rapidly having a set of choices, a strategy, will help you to know what to do.

Only the strategic, who wield their strategic choices as a decision making tool will thrive.

But how do you know what choices to make?

Get a diversity of perspectives

Traditionally strategy was decided by leadership and then communicated to the rest of the organization. The problem with that approach was that it can be very myopic.

Strategic choices will be limited by the biases and mental models of the few people in leadership. Leadership hierarchies make this worse such that strategy will be determined by the biases and mental models of one or maybe two leaders.

A top down strategy development model seems hardly suited for an environment such as life sciences and healthcare research and innovation that requires collaboration and adaptability.

Even if the strategy effort is broadened to all levels of an organization there still remains a risk of groupthink.

Groupthink is when a group converges on an idea because of group dynamics and not because of the value of the idea.

For example members of the group may be reluctant to speak up with a contrarian view because that will create tension with others with whom they have a relationship.

The first step to any thinking process is to think divergently. What are the possibilities. This is the strength of traditional brainstorming, get as many ideas on the table as possible.

This type of thinking is best done when there is a diversity of perspectives. A diverse group of stakeholders can help to surface ideas and possibilities that you had never previously considered.

One way that group creativity, or group genius, has been studied is to examine Broadway musicals

In his book Group Genius Keith Sawyer that musicals are great for studying group dynamics because musicals require the collaboration of a diverse group and there is a readily available outcome measure - box office receipts.

It turns out that Broadway musicals where the group is comprised of a balance of people who are familiar with each and newcomers do the best. Such a grouping is less susceptible to groupthink.

The musical effect in the life sciences?

One of the features of the life sciences is that it is necessarily a multi-stakeholder, and multi-disciplinary effort.

The best science in the world dies a slow death when it is confined to the pages of scientific publications.

For good science to have impact the stakeholders who have to engage with the science to make something useful from it have to know and believe in it.

Even when a new therapy, diagnostic or piece of technology is produced if the stakeholders that have to implement it, clinicians, or those that have to use it, patients, don’t know about it or believe in it, it will die a ‘build it and they will come’ death.

The multi-stakeholder nature of life science research and innovation is both a curse and a blessing.

It is a blessing in that there are a lot of people with different perspectives and diverse expertise who are interested in what’s possible and what the future may hold. Engage them in helping to build your strategy.

What is available to you is what is often called collective intelligence or group genius. I think the term collective creativity is the more relevant for efforts to define a strategy.

To be like successful broadway musicals it is best to have a group of stakeholders that includes those who know the organization well and those who don’t. Its best to encourage as much divergent thinking as possible. You can do this by making it psychologically safe to present any idea or possibility regardless of how bizarre it may be.

It also helps to be explicit about the importance of entertaining unusual, controversial, or counterintuitive ideas.

But once you have a list of divergent ideas you are not done. In fact, divergent thinking is what traditional brainstorming is all about. There are now plenty of studies that show that traditional brainstorming is not effective.

Diverse stakeholders can also help you in convergent thinking.

For each of the possibilities it should be considered what will need to be true for that possibility to be successful.

Asking a group diverse group of stakeholders this question for each possibility can be very revealing.

No one person is the oracle for the future and collectively a group is much more likely to be right.

Its not about consensus

An important thing to remember is that you are not abdicating strategic decision making power to your stakeholders.

You are accessing their collective creativity.

You are listening to them.

Your strategy does not have to include any of the possibilities generated by your stakeholders.

It should, however, reflect the thinking that happened so that they know you listened to them.

If you go down the road of building a consensus amongst your stakeholders you run the risk of group think or not making any decisions at all.

This is what happens when you see an organization define a research agenda for a field and then refuse to prioritize the list of topics.

Is not a strategy, or even angenda. It is a review of the field.

Strategy is about making choices so that resources can be focused.

In the case of a research agenda that describes the entire field without any prioritisation you are focusing the resources of an entire field of researchers.

Why having a strategy is important

In the life sciences it is all too often that a field of research remains too fragmented for research to reach the threshold of evidence that it becomes an accepted piece of new knowledge. Organizations can suffer the same fate.

Developing strategy in the life sciences is complicated by the fact that it can be a long time before one sees the impact of efforts.

It can take decades for a new therapy to move from research finding into clinical implementation.

The further out into the future you have to project the more than everyone has an opinion on what should happen. Yet the choices you make today have an outsized influence on the future.

They set you on a trajectory.

This is why focusing more on the planning aspects of building a strategy can be risky. If you are not making a choice your ability to achieve a pereferable future will diminish.

Strategy is also about strengthening your position.

Shane Parrish in his book Clear Thinking points out that the real benefit of stopping to think about your actions is about strengthening your position.

When you have a strong position you have more options.

Parrish also illustrates how it is the small decisions, the moment to moment decisions, that affect your position. Reacting emotionally to someone may diminish their willingness to help you in the future thereby diminishing your position.

As a set of choices, a strategy can help assure that all those in your organization or consortium are making decisions that strengthen your position.

If your strategy is to leverage your data for more collaborations and funding, then when someone in your consortium is exposed to someone who is interested in your data that person needs to engage the new potential collaborator and bring them to the attention of the consortium.

Strategy is also about what type of work you want to do? This can be disease domain or subdomain, who you serve, or the type of research you support.

Strategy = biggest impact on the lives of patients

In the bigger picture you have to think about how your strategy contributes to a wider impact.

When you talk about strategy for a company the impact you aim to have is financial. X investment will bring in Y for returns. This is usually supported by lots of analysis.

But when you are talking about life science and healthcare research and innovation having a meaningful effect on the lives of individuals suffering from disease is the most important impact.

Unlike business strategy which is often about making a business more competitive, strategy in the life sciences should be considering how strategic choices maximizes the impact you can make with the resources available.

Take for example the case of data. Your organization may want to fund the collection of data or it may be the one using the funding to collect and analyze the data. To achieve the immediate goal, collecting the data, the best approach is to collect the data in a quick and efficient manner without stopping to structure and align data.

But when you take the view of what is the most efficient way to contribute to a wider impact making your data structured in such a way that it can be reused is important and should form part of your strategy.

It should be viewed almost as a constraint that you have to build your strategy around. Crafted in the right way you may even find ways to expand the impact on your organization.

A good strategy should be about finding synergy between wider impact and organizational impact. To take an even broader view a good strategy should strike a balance between scientific and societal impact.

How to develop a strategy

Here is how to develop a strategy with a diverse group of stakeholders. Keep in mind that the stakeholders are there to help reach higher levels of creativity. Its not about choosing your strategy by consensus.

1. Frame or reframe your problem with a diverse group of stakeholders
2. List out possibilities to solve that problem
3. Think together what would have to true for each possibility to become a successful strategy
4. Leave time to think apart
5. Revisit the possibilities and see if one stands out
6. If there is doubt or uncertainty of choice define a set of conditions to be tested
7. Once evidence has been gathered to then make a choice of strategy

Its best to have an outside facilitator who can help guide you and your stakeholders in avoiding group think.

Is impact important to you?

We use the process outlined above to facilitate the development of strategy and develop consortium projects.

When combined together we can produce a strategic playbook that is both a strategy and a set of plans that can be used in a modular manner to begin working together and to assemble multiple proposals as a funding strategy.

If having a meaningful impact is important to you then you need to have a clear strategy. And if that’s the case let’s talk.