"Strategy" gets tossed around a lot in business, but when pressed to define what strategy is, many people get it wrong.
A methodology for amazing meetings. Say goodbye to boring, long, and unproductive meetings.
What makes something a strategy?
It’s a phrase that gets tossed around a lot in business, but when pressed to define it, many smart people get it all wrong.
Most will say it’s a systematic action plan focused on solving problems and achieving goals
This definition not only misses the mark, it often leads us to pursue disparate paths that usually stall and complicate our desired outcomes.
The truth is, when people forge ahead with what they believe to be a strategy, they’re usually doing some form of strategic planning instead.
To help, this article defines and demystifies what makes a strategy.
Contrary to popular belief, a strategy is not a plan or a set of tactics.
A strategy is a framework for making business decisions that inform plans and tactics. These decisions range from high-level choices like “How will we differentiate ourselves from competitors?” to operational realities like “How will we hire and onboard new talent?”
When faced with questions like these, our first response is usually to start listing every activity or consideration needed to complete either task. But the process of brainstorming around “the how” isn’t building a strategy—it’s planning.
A strategy doesn’t concern itself with the details surrounding execution. A strategy establishes how an organization or individual team plans to win the game.
With a strategy in place, an organization ensures that each of its teams aligns around cohesive plans that work in support of big picture business objectives.
The risks of not having a strategy are apparent for anyone who’s ever worked at a company where decision-making seemed arbitrary.
Without a framework to guide its decisions, an organization and its teams usually:
Making matters worse, a lack of organizational strategy often leads to dips in morale when KPIs aren’t met due to whimsical decision-making and a pattern of pivots.
{{10x="/blog-inserts"}}
A lack of strategy is sometimes the fault of department managers, but it’s usually a top-down problem. Organizations that function without a strategy tend to struggle with:
There are many ways to approach building a strategy, but all sound strategies share a few common characteristics.
If a newly hired content marketing manager needed to create a strategy, for example, a good one might:
Start with analysis
From looking at competitor content to performing an internal content audit, a sound strategy starts with an assessment of what is and isn’t working.
Challenge assumptions
In the process of analysis, you’re likely to encounter patterns that form mental connections between seemingly unrelated subjects. Our content marketing manager might notice that a competitor with an engaged social audience doesn’t seem to rely very much on SEO. This would enable the strategist to challenge the status quo by suggesting other routes to attracting an audience.
Establish a vision
As an analysis gradually becomes a hypothesis, a good strategy turns into a vision. This is the stage where you move beyond questions to form statements.
A question like “Could we build our content calendar around the goal of engaging people on social media?” becomes something more like “We’ll become the leading company voice on LinkedIn in our industry.”
It might sound grand, but developing a strategic vision like this arms an organization with a clear path that makes it easy to disregard anything that doesn’t serve the strategy. It also helps a strategist to test their hypotheses against their chosen tactics.
{{keep-teams-aligned="/blog-inserts"}}