My family and I recently moved to a new city, a place I haven’t lived before. I say recently primarily to justify my on-going use of Apple Maps, but really, we’ve been there for over a year now. Even though work, school and most everything we need is only 10-15mins away, I continue to use Apple Maps. Despite my wife’s taunts.
Over the time of our shift, my work required me to be involved in either outworking or developing strategy for multiple organisations. As we navigated the economic and organisational challenges, I found myself getting in the car at the start of each day, heading into the office on one of the few routes that I follow every day, yet once again setting up Maps to plot my course.
While I am quite capable of driving to work without maps, something in the simplicity of the process and additional information (estimated arrival time, traffic updates, etc) added value to the trip. During the process I found myself reflecting on the concept of having a strategy in light of the process of using maps.
‘Strategy’ seems to be a word, like many others in society, which is straining under the burden of unexpressed expectation. For an extreme example take the word ‘woke’. Due to someone’s view or experience using the word can cause a reaction which is different than intended. Similarly, ‘strategy’, can mean many different things to many different people, every meaning comes with either positive or negative experiences. This results in charged conversations, uncommunicated meanings and is a challenge for any team, couples or individuals to overcome.
Over the next few thoughts, I wanted to share a couple of perspectives from using Maps as an analogy to simplify strategy. Whether the strategy is within a business, as parents, or as an individual, this simply attempts to develop a baseline to build on. This is not a treatise of strategy, but rather a simplistic approach to outline the point of a strategy, a single method of developing it and how to engage with it in an on-going way.
So firstly, why is Maps a good analogy to use when it comes to discussing strategy? To answer that, we have to first define what a strategy is. While there are an outrageously large number of different definitions, most include something like ‘a plan over time, to achieve a long-term outcome’. The one I use is fairly simple; strategy is a plan that gets you from A to B. Strategy, in my mind, seeks to answer the question, how? When we find ourselves somewhere, and desire to get somewhere or achieve something else, the next question naturally follows, how are we going to do that?
This is what Maps delivers on with an elegant simplicity. I’m at A, how do I get to B.
Before we dive into how Maps achieves this, it’s helpful to clarify some quick thoughts about what strategy is, and what it’s not. Firstly, strategy is not the goal, and nor is the goal to have a strategy. Strategy is how you get to the goal. No strategy is more important than the goal, nor is it an end state in and of itself. It’s no more or less important that a crucial tool in our tool belt to help us get where we’re going.
Further, strategy is not the values. Maps doesn’t tell me how to drive, how fast to accelerate, whether to remain in a Zen like calm or rage as I flick between the lanes finding the optimum one. Strategy is how you get there; values are how you want to behave on the journey. Changing what you value might be a crucial part of your strategy but what you value isn’t the strategy.
However, strategies are subject to certain constraints. Firstly, they’re subject to having limited resources, namely time and money. This is so crucial to understand and is where the creative challenge of developing a strategy exists. Not being able to do everything we want right now is what gives rise to the need for a strategy. Wrestling with the opportunity cost, in both time and finance, is the challenge of creating a strategy.
Strategy is also subject to change. A crash on the motorway, backlogged traffic, a realisation I have no food for dinner and need to stop at the supermarket on the way home, these all impact the course we take. We can spend countless hours developing a perfect strategy which is ready to respond to every eventuality, or we can spend a good amount of time coming up with a good strategy given what we currently know, provided we’re willing to change. Not so long we never move, not so short we move in the wrong direction. This tension is we live in.
Finally, strategy is elusive. It’s not easy. Having the desire to achieve something, coming up with a plan (and most importantly actioning it) requires moving beyond the status quo. It’s far easier to remain as you are, in the state you or your organisation is in, than it is to change.
This is the reason for this series of thoughts. To give us an every-day analogy to simplify the process. It doesn’t have to be complex, and in fact, the process has already been thought through and refined. So, let’s unpack just exactly how that looks like in the next thought.