A real strategy

Recently, I heard a strategy that was fantastic.  It was an outsourcing strategy, and was quite simply “if it can fit on a truck, we aren’t building it“.

Why did I love this strategy?  Because it was actually a strategy!  It wasn’t a purpose or intent, an objective, nor was it a plan.  It was a strategy.

A strategy is nothing more than a sentence or three that sums up the approach or philosophy that we are going to use to guide us in achieving an intent.  It gives us the filters that we can then use to make decisions.  Look at the outsourcing strategy I referred to above.  If you are a Senior Manager running a production line, your decisions on what to outsource are now clear and you can come up with a Production Plan.

The General Manager who set the strategy gets three important things out of this: 1) they can be confident decisions will align with the strategy; 2) they will be involved in less discussions and meetings helping their people decide;  3) their people will feel like respected adults who can be trusted to make a decision, which they actually are!

Don’t get the wrong idea, however.  While coming up with a sentence or three might be easy, a good strategy must be defensible.  This is because if it’s wrong it’s not going to get found out for at least a couple of years, by which time it might be too late to undo.

A defensible strategy can answer two simple questions: 1) why will that work?  2) why will that work for us in particular?  Answers to the first question require good old environmental analysis, but don’t study everything – look for the things that either must be in place, or must not be in place in the environment for the strategy to be successful.

And it’s the same for the second question, except now it’s about the organisation – what does the organisation both need to be good at and stop being bad at for the strategy to work, and why is that actually possible?

Answer both of these question well, with evidence, and you’ve got yourself a defensible strategy.   Now, and only now, can you set about planning.

“If it can fit on a truck, we’re not building it“.

We can work with that.