Why your strategy probably isn’t a good strategy (or a strategy at all)

One of the best books written about strategy is Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt.

I like it for a number of reasons. Not least because the author is someone who clearly knows what he is talking about - based on decades of genuine strategic thinking and planning experience.

And I think he is entirely correct in his view that good strategy is actually quite rare – and nowhere more so than in the area of communications and social media strategy.

According to Rumelt: “The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors. A good strategy recognizes the nature of the challenge and offers a way of surmounting it. Simply being ambitious is not a strategy. A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision. A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them. And the greater the challenge, the more a good strategy focuses and coordinates efforts to achieve a powerful competitive punch or problem-solving effect. Unfortunately, good strategy is the exception, not the rule.

 “And the problem is growing. More and more organizational leaders say they have a strategy, but they do not. Instead, they espouse what I call bad strategy. Bad strategy tends to skip over pesky details such as problems. It ignores the power of choice and focus, trying instead to accommodate a multitude of conflicting demands and interests. Like a quarterback whose only advice to teammates is “Let’s win,” bad strategy covers up its failure to guide by embracing the language of broad goals, ambition, vision, and values. Each of these elements is, of course, an important part of human life. But, by themselves, they are not substitutes for the hard work of strategy.”

This must surely strike a chord with anyone who has ever had to work creating a communications or social media strategy.

And as Rumelt reminds us: “To make matters worse, for many people in business, education, and government, the word “strategy” has become a verbal tic.  A word that can mean anything has lost its bite. To give content to a concept one has to draw lines, marking off what it denotes and what it does not . To begin the journey toward clarity, it is helpful to recognize that the words “strategy” and “strategic” are often sloppily used to mark decisions made by the highest-level officials.”

So what makes for a good strategy?

Says Rumelt: “A good strategy has an essential logical structure that I call the kernel.

The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:

1. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.

2. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.

3. A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.

How often do communications or social media strategies honestly address and define the real nature of the challenge?

How to detect a bad strategy

As Rumelt states: “The first natural advantage of good strategy arises because other organizations often don’t have one. And because they don’t expect you to have one either.  A good strategy has coherence, coordinating actions, policies, and resources so as to accomplish an important end. Many organizations, most of the time, don’t have this. Instead they have multiple goals and initiatives that symbolize progress, but no coherent approach to accomplishing that progress other than “spend more and try harder.”

Or more often in the realm of PR and social media – spend less and try harder.

In order to detect a bad strategy, Rumelt suggests looking for one or more of its four major hallmarks:

Fluff. Fluff is a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments. It uses “Sunday” words (words that are inflated and unnecessarily abstruse) and apparently esoteric concepts to create the illusion of high-level thinking. (Is your comms strategy guilty of fluff?)

Failure to face the challenge. Bad strategy fails to recognize or define the challenge. When you cannot define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy or improve it. (Have you really addressed the problem?)

Mistaking goals for strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles.

Bad strategic objectives. A strategic objective is set by a leader as a means to an end. Strategic objectives are “bad” when they fail to address critical issues or when they are impracticable. (How many social media strategies are simply lists of unrealistic targets? Make it go viral…..)

If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen .

Again, anyone who has ever had to work creating a communications or social media strategy will be familiar with many of these issues.

So what guidance can we take from Rumelt that might help us in developing good communications and social media strategies?

Continues Rumelt: “Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favourable outcomes. One form of bad strategic objectives occurs when there is a scrambled mess of things to accomplish — a “dog’s dinner” of strategic objectives. A long list of “things to do,” often mislabeled as “strategies” or “objectives,” is not a strategy. It is just a list of things to do. Such lists usually grow out of planning meetings in which a wide variety of stakeholders make suggestions as to things they would like to see done. Rather than focus on a few important items, the group sweeps the whole day’s collection into the “strategic plan.”

He also singles out so called “Blue Sky Objectives” for particular criticism:

“A blue sky objective is usually a simple restatement of the desired state of affairs or of the challenge. It skips over the annoying fact that no one has a clue as to how to get there.”

Also, when a leader characterizes the challenge as underperformance, it sets the stage for bad strategy. Underperformance is a result. The true challenges are the reasons for the underperformance. Unless leadership offers a theory of why things haven’t worked in the past, or why the challenge is difficult, it is hard to generate good strategy.

Strategy as hard choices

Strategy is scarcity’s child and to have a strategy, rather than vague aspirations, is to choose one path and eschew others. There is difficult psychological, political, and organizational work in saying “no” to whole worlds of hopes, dreams, and aspirations.

As Rumelt asserts: “When a strategy works, we tend to remember what was accomplished, not the possibilities that were painfully set aside. Strategies focus resources, energy, and attention on some objectives rather than others . Unless collective ruin is imminent, a change in strategy will make some people worse off. Hence, there will be powerful forces opposed to almost any change in strategy. This is the fate of many strategy initiatives in large organizations. There may be talk about focusing on this or pushing on that, but at the end of the day no one wants to change what they are doing very much. Put differently, universal buy-in usually signals the absence of choice. Strategy is the craft of figuring out which purposes are both worth pursuing and capable of being accomplished.

There is no template for strategy

Rumelt has particular disdain for the notion that there are convenient templates for strategy development: “There is a large industry of consultants and book writers who are willing to provide instruction on the delicate differences between missions, visions, strategies, initiatives, and priorities. From small boutiques to the large IT-based firms trying to break into strategy work, consultants have found that template-style strategy frees them from the onerous work of analyzing the true challenges and opportunities faced by the client. Plus, by couching strategy in terms of positives — vision, mission, and values — no feelings are hurt.”

Thinking alone will not make it so

Another facet of bad strategy is that by thinking only of success you can become a success. As Rumelt says: “these are forms of psychosis and cannot be recommended as approaches to management or strategy. All analysis starts with the consideration of what may happen, including unwelcome events. I would not care to fly in an aircraft designed by people who focused only on an image of a flying airplane and never considered modes of failure. Nevertheless, the doctrine that one can impose one’s visions and desires on the world by the force of thought alone retains a powerful appeal to many people. Its acceptance displaces critical thinking and good strategy."

Strategies are designs not decisions

In conclusion, Rumelt suggests that effective strategies are more designs than decisions — they are more constructed than chosen. Doing strategy is more like designing a high-performance aircraft than deciding which forklift truck to buy or how large to build a new factory . When someone says "Managers are decision makers", they are not talking about master strategists, for a master strategist is a designer.

“A design-type strategy is an adroit configuration of resources and actions that yields an advantage in a challenging situation . Given a set bundle of resources, the greater the competitive challenge, the greater the need for the clever, tight integration of resources and actions. Given a set level of challenges , higher  quality resources lessen the need for the tight integration of resources and actions.

“A more tightly integrated design is harder to create, narrower in focus, more fragile in use, and less flexible in responding to change. A Formula 1 racing car, for example, is a tightly integrated design and is faster around the track than a Subaru Forester, but the less tightly integrated Forester is useful for a much wider range of purposes. Nevertheless, when the competitive challenge is very high, it may be necessary to accept these costs and design a tightly integrated response . With less challenge, it is normally better to have a bit less specialization and integration so that a broader market can be addressed.”

How does your own communications or social media strategy measure up in the light of the above? Does any of it ring true in relation to your own client or organisational communications challenges? Have you designed a strategy? Or is it simply a wish list of aspirational targets put together to appease all stakeholders?

Let me know in the comments below.