Strategy in Four Words or Less

Last year I wrote a post titled "Consultants Suck." In it, I made reference to a strategy weekend I did for an association client. It wasn't a full-blown strategic plan (those of you who know me understand I wouldn't do that!). It was a weekend of facilitation for a large group of stakeholders (including competitors!), to try and get clear about strategy. When I gave my opening shpiel, I told them that I thought consultants tended to overcomplicate strategy. I actually got some applause.

As I said in the previous post, I don't really think consultants suck. I think nearly all consultants spend tremendous amounts of time and energy delivering real value to clients. We care, we do good work, and we make a difference. But even though we're well intended, we've generally missed the mark on strategy, particularly in the association world.

I said earlier this week that we don't take strategy seriously, and the consultants, I am afraid, are accomplices in this crime. As much as we genuinely do care, we tend to get sucked in to the clients' need for immediate answers, and we've developed processes, theories, frameworks, and consulting packages that result in products--but rarely better strategies, or, more importantly, capacity for developing better strategies. I've tried to develop elegant models and frameworks. I think they've been pretty good, but they haven't passed the test. So I'm going in the other direction--risking oversimplification. I've come up with strategy in four words:

• Understand
• Choose
• Do
• Learn

When I boil it down, that's strategy. Understand your world, make choices about direction, do things, and learn in the process. I could develop a year-long consulting process based on this. I could design super-new-improved SWOT analyses to help you better understand, or I could bring in futurists and do a great scenario-planning process. Hell, I could get hundreds of your stakeholders together and we could all do collage! Whatever I or any other consultant could do for you would probably generate some insight. You would, in fact, understand things better and you might even make some good choices. But we (the consultants) did it for you, or at least coerced you into doing it, and I don't think that works.

Instead of buying a strategic planning process, first take a hard look at how your organization really handles the four words of understand, choose, do, and learn. What is it your organization does on an annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly basis to ensure your understanding of your operating environment and your strategy is adequate? Seriously, make a list. I suspect you're not doing enough, or at least not achieving an adequately deep level of understanding. Fix that. Change the way you do things and/or start doing new things.

Then ask the same question (again, for annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly timeframes) about how your organization makes choices. About how you do things. About how you learn. Then start changing things so you improve in these four areas. If you want to bring in a consultant to help you, fine (we're pretty good at designing processes and facilitating conversations that might be important parts of the changes you're making). But I think you need to start doing it yourself first. Because it's a myth that you can't. And until you do, I think our consulting (that has really tremendous potential) will fall short.

Comments

[Ellen]

Jamie -- Curious about what you think of leaving vision (where our association should go) and purpose (why our association exists) to the highest level of an association's leadership to determine and drive, while pushing the strategy (how to get it done) to the mid-levels of leadership?

Using your four-words, this means leadership focuses on the first, "Understand," while the others -- "Choose," "Do," and "Learn" -- are territories of action that committees and staffers could tackle.

Perhaps "Learn" is the iterative step -- goes back to the leadership: what have they learned about the association's vision (and opportunity to achieve it) based on the implementation of the mid-points?

I suggest that the reason so many strategies go stale or are otherwise ineffective is because they're dreamed up at the top, assigned to the middle, and pushed out to the members (if it even gets that far). Including staffers and committee chairs in the strategic planning process is a good thing, but not a guarantee for success, as the strategy will still be owned by the leadership (where the heart of financial power beats as well).

So distilling and simplifying are a good idea, but it still assumes that there's a fully cooperative effort in defining and implementing the strategy.

[Jamie Notter]

Great comment, Ellen. Understand, Choose, Do, and Learn are the responsibility of the ENTIRE system. Period. The system will have to figure out what activities happen at what level to make sure they are done well, but I wouldn't automatically think that any of the four are confined to one level. There's nothing wrong with having the leadership body make critical choices around strategic direction, but that doesn't eliminate choice from all other levels. Each level has its own work to do in figuring out how the choices they make impact strategy.

And yes, when understand is left only to the top of the chain, you're in trouble, particularly in the linear and once-yearly strategy processes that associations seem to like so much. That "fully cooperative effort in defining and implementing the strategy" is actually at the very heart of what I'm talking about. THAT is strategy. That's what we need to be doing.

[CV Harquail]

Jamie,
I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for condensing soccer strategy into 16 words (at http://www.AuthenticOrganizations.com ), but you've beaten me to the ultimate goal (pun intended). Just as simple statements work for kids' sports teams, they work for grownups' organizations, and vice versa. So I'm taking your 4 words of strategy back to my soccer team *and* my work team. Thanks. cvh