What is 'strategy'?
What constitutes a strategy? Now there’s a debate. You’ll find a shelf full of books on the topic in any store or library with a business section, and dozens of articles online. And that’s before we even being to ask what a good strategy is…
Still I think I have something that I can add following the principle of “the nail and not the hammer”. In other words, focusing on the job to be done rather than tool for solving it.
The job to be done for a strategy is that it gives you something clear and simple to hold on to, that helps you orient yourself amid the natural chaos of your daily working life.
Chaos is not a problem, by the way. Chaos really is the natural condition of things - particularly if you are manager or leader, where interruption is the nature of the work.
Chaos is natural because the world out there is a teeming mass of constantly changing and ambiguous details. Reality will not stay still from one moment to the next. To quote Richard Feynman:
Philosophers are always saying, “Well, just take a chair for example.” The moment they say that, you know that they do not know what they are talking about any more. What is a chair? Well, a chair is a certain thing over there … certain?, how certain? The atoms are evaporating from it from time to time — not many atoms, but a few — dirt falls on it and gets dissolved in the paint; so to define a chair precisely, to say exactly which atoms are chair, and which atoms are air, or which atoms are dirt, or which atoms are paint that belongs to the chair is impossible.
If even a chair is uncertain, is it really any wonder that your to do list - that seemed so cast iron yesterday? - now already feels almost irrelevant?
If facing this makes you uncomfortable, just know you are not alone. I feel your pain too. If only reality would just behave. But it won’t be pinned down.
The best way through is to give yourself something to hold onto. Some sense of direction, some principles for how you are going to crystallise messy reality into workable patterns. Something that, although there are innumerable demands on your time, will remind you what you are doing it all for - and therefore which bits to pay attention to, and which bits to let go.
In the middle of our daily lives, we are among the trees. Of course we cannot see the wood. From where we are standing, there is no wood. That’s why we often think about strategy at an off site meeting. We need physical space to step back from the details, and to draw a big abstraction. An abstraction that we can keep coming back to once we dive back down into forest, and everything comes rushing at us all at once.
