Manoeuvres – your key to having an ACTUAL strategy

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Three things all clients want from strategy days, which I know because they tell me when we meet.

1. Practical actions
2. Avoid waffling
3. Keeping ‘interesting’ participants in check

There is a simple word I use which gives us all three of these, and that’s

manoeuvres.

I first heard this word in the context of strategy from Lucy Loh and Patrick Hoverstadt, authors of the brilliant book Patterns of Strategy, and for me it was a game-changer.

Let me elaborate.

Definition

Well first  – it’s a bugger to spell.  Following the rules that the British version is always more difficult, we go for ‘manoeuvres’ in Australia, ‘maneuver’ in the USA.  (Then why is theatre still spelled like that USA?)

Now, what does it mean?

A manoeuvre is defined in ways such as:

• a movement or series of moves requiring skill and care.
• carefully guide to achieve an end.
• a series of tactical exercises usually carried out in the field by large bodies of troops in simulating the conditions of war.

The key for me is the idea of a stringing a few things together.  Which lead to my definition of

• A coherent set of moves

Fancy hey!

Now…putting this in context….

Strategy Hierarchy

There’s what I call a ‘strategy hierarchy’.  Not hierarchy as in who gets to tell who what to do, but hierarchy in that later stages create context and meaning for earlier stages (which is how to set up organisational hierarchy so it actually enables people, but that’s another story).

It goes like this:

Purpose – what you exist for.  This is more constrained than you think, as your past investments in technology, methods, locations etc. are going to have a huge influence on what you fundamentally do.

Vision and mission can come in here if you like.  I like ‘possibility’ as a focussing word, but whatever.

Strategy – the choices we make on where to allocate our finite resources to create a coherent set of manoeuvres relative to the other actors in our environment to take us toward a position that best allows us to achieve our purpose.

Yes – I’m being quite deliberate with this definition – I’ll come back to it.

Plans – the actual deliverables that need to be produced to make the manoeuvres happen – the what-by-whens, in what order.

Tactics – decisions and actions to overcome obstacles and issues encountered along the way, such as discovering the castle has a moat!

Now…here’s the trick – the difference between the top and the bottom is….time.  So our hierarchy is best drawn like this:

And what we want to do in a strategy day is make sure we are focussing on…strategy!

So…Strategy

So strategy is about the manoeuvres. The coherent moves we are going to make.  And this simple word is powerful, because:

• Groups want to talk about moves, about options, about what we could do (strategy is not supposed be soul-crushing boredom)…so it’s easy to leave the waffle about ‘why are we here’ behind
• If we need to go back to Purpose – we know exactly why to do this (we can’t choose a preferred strategy if we don’t know what it’s supposed to head toward)
• It gets us clear of going on about individual projects, which inevitably leads to ‘strategy’ instead becoming an arranging exercise of putting various initiatives under five ‘pillars’, including all of them so no-one gets sad.  Doing everything is the opposite of strategy – if we had infinite resources, the strategy would simply be do it all.

Using ‘manoeuvres’, we end up with a preferred strategy, and a coherent and clear set of moves, which are exactly the practical actions boards and executive leadership are looking for.  They aren’t looking for specific projects, but they don’t want to spend a day deciding“we exist to be valuable to people who value us” either.

Not just whole organisations

These concepts are not just for whole enterprises.  Anytime we have an actor in a system with an issue, spending a bit of time to surface some options and choose a set of moves designed to best achieve what we’re here for reaps huge rewards.  The ideas apply to departments within organisations, individuals, groups of concerned parents and guardians. Anything.

It’s our key question – what are the moves we need to make? What manoeuvres?

A bit of time to step out of the plans and tactics, to quickly reaffirm purpose (don’t be changing it unless you must)…then to develop a few different sets of moves…will always pay off in both the short and the long-term.

Bringing it Home

Manoeuvres – it’s a powerful word that creates discussions at the strategic level we need. 

Drop it into your next strategy or planning day…and watch the conversations lift, and get focused!