What Not To Do

We’ve been doing a lot of work on our strategy at Sun Spiral over the last few weeks and one of the things this has brought home is that thinking strategically is as much about deciding what not to do as what to do. If a strategy is the path you determine to make through the wild woods, there are of course other potential paths that have to be ignored in order to make progress. This can be a difficult choice. What if there are interesting things we might have liked to look at on the other path? What if the other path actually turns out to be quicker or more worthwhile?

I run across this a lot in my work with young people who are making decisions about what their next step will be after school or college. When asked whether they have a particular career goal in mind, many will say that they don’t know what they want to do. In most cases I get the sense that this is based on a reasonable concern that committing to a particular path means saying no to other potentially interesting opportunities and therefore rigidly defining them before they’ve had the chance to explore more possibilities. The role of their advisor therefore becomes about trying to help them determine what is going to create the most value.

Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter likens defining a strategy to accepting limits and making a series of trade-offs, which shouldn’t be determined lightly. When we write our OKRs at Sun Spiral, it’s not a quick chat and a few lines jotted down, it’s a series of conversations where preconceptions are challenged and long held notions are sometimes dashed. To find the right path, we have to balance being scrupulous in our analysis with being bold in our ambitions, all the while trying not to suck the joy out of what we are trying to achieve. We’ve had to say no, or at least not now, to ideas that I’ve held onto for years and this can be difficult, but ultimately it should help us to define what we are and what we are not so that we can easily identify what is progress and what is procrastination.

As a recent example, we watched the film Black Widow at the weekend and there is a scene where Natasha is on a ferry in Norway. The scenery is spectacular and led to a brief conversation about visiting Norway one day, to which I said, ‘Ooh, maybe I could learn to speak Norwegian!’. I then had to have a word with myself: another hobby, another focus for my already limited time? Would that really be progress or procrastination?

Knowing what not to do is an integral element of thinking strategically that can be applied to business and personal development. It’s important, though, to remember that not every aspect of life needs a strategy. If we’re trying to make progress then developing a strategy is incredibly useful, however sometimes we just want to enjoy a wander through the woods. Being able to appreciate the difference is crucial.

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