Strategy: The Things You Won't Be Doing
A Practical Definition and Beginner's Guide to Implementation
Strategy isn't about predicting the future, but rather about consciously choosing one path forward while deliberately saying no to all other options. The key to success lies not just in making this choice, but in ensuring your entire team understands and aligns on both what you're choosing to do and, more importantly, what you're choosing not to do.
If you wander into a bookstore (assuming you can still find one) and saunter over to the business section, your eyeballs will be assaulted by the sheer number of books with the word ‘strategy’ in the title.
It seems everyone and their dog has a definition of the word. It is perhaps for this reason, that it still feels like such an amorphous idea, reserved for ‘senior execs’ and other such corporate nonsense.
How We See It
In our facilitated group sessions and coaching relationships we find it’s important to have a good working definition of ‘strategy’. We derive that definition like this…
Imagine you have a problem.
There are a large number of things you might try to solve that problem.
Those things group into buckets of ‘solutions that require roughly the same approach’ - like different paths through a garden where one is lined with assorted types of roses and another with various kinds of apple trees.
Choosing one path excludes all the other paths until you either solve your problem or decide to abandon the path you’re on and move to another.
We then take this chain of reasoning and boil it down to a single thought…
A strategy is an idea that tells you all the things you won’t be trying
Coaching, Everywhere, All At Once
You may have noticed that the idea of thinking about a problem, understanding all the ways you might attack it, picking a path (and consciously deferring all the other paths) sounds a lot like what happens in a one-on-one coaching conversation.
We see almost no difference between the fundamentals of coaching an individual or coaching an organization (something that inevitably yields a strategy).
One of the reasons this similarity is important is that strategy is often perceived as being the result of making predictions about the future; to predict where the ball is going and run towards that point.
We see the same instinct in personal growth strategies - people try to optimize their value based on their sense of what companies might need from them in years to come.
The reality is that having and executing a good strategy is an attempt to create the future rather than merely predict it. Indeed, the hope is that this predictability will be a side effect of the fact that you put your hand decisively on the steering wheel.
Key Questions
If you find yourself tasked with formulating a strategy, try asking the following questions to help guide your thinking…
Do we have a really solid definition of the problem at hand?
If we try something, do we have ways to measure whether our problem has been addressed?
Have we taken enough time to think about all the different kinds of solutions that might be worth trying (including a few moonshots for good measure)?
If we’re ready to ‘pick a horse’, what’s our theory about the kinds of changes we should see?
How soon will we know whether we made a less than ideal choice?
How quickly will we be able to pivot if so?
Alignment
Once you have a strategy, it’s just as important to make sure that the affected people both understand it and are aligned with it. We were once coaching a team where the CEO was seriously stressed because the leadership team kept making decisions that pulled in opposite directions. It turned out, after just 30 minutes of asking the right questions, that they were all using subtly different definitions of key words in their strategy.
In that spirit, consider these questions…
If you were to present your team with 10 possible solutions to the current problem and ask them to cull all the ones that should be excluded by the current strategy, would you end up with the same list from each person?
If each team member took a single, ‘obvious’ word from your strategy (like ‘product’ or ‘quickly’) and then explained what they thought it meant, how many other team members would find their assumptions unexpectedly upended?
All strategies involve trade offs. How well are team members able to identify risks that emerge from the trade offs present in the current strategy?
Remember that strategy is ultimately about making clear choices and following through on them with conviction. The questions outlined above aren't just theoretical exercises – they're practical tools to help you and your team navigate complex decisions with clarity and purpose.
By regularly revisiting these questions and maintaining open dialogue about your strategic choices, you can build a more aligned team that understands not just where you're going, but why you've chosen not to go elsewhere. This shared understanding becomes your compass for decision-making at every level of the organization.
If you feel like you’d like some more support with this topic and the opportunity to go deeper and further, consider 1-on-1 coaching or a group working session with us.