To Win at Scaling, Think Strategically and Act Tactically

Can you "execute" a strategic plan?

My short answer is NO because strategy and tactics are two different dimensions.

Execution requires both strategic and tactical dimensions of thinking. Strategy guides your broad decisions, while tactics guide your actions. The problem is that impatient or stressed-out founders tend to jump from strategy to action, assuming they have thought of everything. The cold truth is that no plan survives first contact with reality.

Strategy is cerebral. It is about gaming various scenarios, exploring options, and dealing with hypotheses and assumptions. Strategic planning is vision-focused, the "who am I", "what do I want to create" and "why is this important to me".?Strategic planning is setting long-term intentions - one, three, five, ten years out. Strategic planning is essential because it provides a context and a purpose for provoking a change to the status quo.

Tactical thinking is objective-focused, the "how", the detailed actions needed to move the yardstick forward in daily, weekly, and quarterly increments.

Strategic planning is abstract because it deals with possibilities and assumptions over time. Tactical thinking is how we dance with reality and respond to the actual situation on the ground and in the moment. Tactics focus on immediate execution to create measurable and tangible results.

Tactical plans are short-term: quickly created, boldly executed, then summarily discarded. The results of a tactical action create a new reality, which in turn requires a new tactical plan. Rapid execution of a succession of tactical plans moves you step by step towards realizing the overall strategic plan. Then, your strategic plan evolves with your tactical results.

The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework is an ideal structure for a tactical plan. OKR addresses two questions:

• What is the change you want to create in the short term? (= The Objective)
• What metrics will tell you that you have succeeded in making the change? (= The Key Results)

Objectives are qualitative changes that align with and support the overall Strategic Plan. The mistake that I often see is that Objectives are defined without context. You must not pluck objectives out of thin air without a clear context of how it fits into a larger picture.?

The other mistake I see is confusing Key Results with Actions. These are two distinct elements. A well-defined OKR dictates a series of actions. These actions change the status-quo, as measured by the Key Results.?

For example: if my Objective for the quarter is to “build credibility in my immediate Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM)”, how could an external observer measure that I am achieving this objective? It could be through Key Results such as “number of qualified referrals” “Net Promoter Score” or “number of signups to newsletter”.?

Then I would establish my Immediate Actions to start to move these Key Result metrics: adding a mechanism to capture NPS or referrals on the website, participating in trade events, or doing a social media campaign.

The quantitative results I achieve will indicate how close I am to provoking the qualitative objective I set out to execute. If my actions are not getting the results I want, I can change my actions, or my objective or work back to adjust my Strategic Plan.

As you embark on your scaling journey, the Strategic Plan you establish interacts with the Tactical Objectives that you execute, feeding back to adapt your Strategic Plan to the reality you discover on the ground. Your Business Model, technology roadmap, investment plan, and staffing plan will also constantly evolve monthly, quarterly, and yearly.

Being able to think strategically and act tactically is how you succeed in these unpredictable times. You need to adjust your action plans daily as you validate and invalidate assumptions while discovering new insights about your customers, market, and technology.

If your Strategic Plan is not evolving with the results of your OKRs, you will end up crashing against a wall. Both strategy and tactics must evolve with reality. In the end, if what you are doing today is what you did yesterday, then you are not doing it right.

Davender's passion is to guide founders and entrepreneurs in developing the knowledge, skills and confidence to enter, engage and lead their markets in an unpredictable world by thinking strategically and acting tactically. His blog can be found at https://blog.davender.com