Are you excellent in strategy ?

Strategies which fit your specific situation seldom come from outside help, even so that promise tastes so sweet. So – how good are you at setting up your strategy on your own? Here is a framework to test yourself and to develop the strategic personality needed.

Here is my selling point to keep you reading:
You can buy a strategy from smart people or you can become smart yourself and develop a strategy on your own. The disadvantage of the first is that it comes from the outside as an inorganic solution.  Even if this strategy considers all relevant information regarding your specific context it can never fully consider you as the relevant person. If two people would be in the exact same situation the right strategy for each one would substantially differ because of your different personalities. An organic strategy considers all relevant information – both the outside context and you as a person. This is also true for organisations as they have an even more complex personality too. This article serves as a first step in understanding how you as a person make a difference to your strategy – independent of any external factors. With this awareness you are ready for the second step, which is how to develop yourself to make conscious organic strategies.

To understand how your personality effects your strategy,  I want to use a simple framework which consists of the dimensions of a strategy (time, context, direction and path) and the process of strategizing (sense, ideate, choose, mobilize, perform and achieve).
The good news is that you have already practiced this framework quite naturally all of your life – if not you probably wouldn’t be alive anymore. Whenever you had to make a decision, you considered the impact of the past and the potential of the future (time), you evaluated the overall situation (context), set a (direction) and started by taking action (path). To do this, you looked at information from various sources (sense), developed alternative ideas (ideate), selected the one that seemed to be best fit (choose), left the past behind (mobilize), followed your plans (perform) and harvested the results (achieve).

This approach is by nature organic as it emerges from you and not from an external solution. But this has a potential downside too. In each dimension and in every process step your personality consciously or unconsciously substantially influences the outcome.  If you fully trust yourself, you may stop reading here. But excellence is not based on ignorance but on your level of personal mastership. So as you are still reading, let us dig a little deeper into how your personality effects your level of excellence in strategy.

Most literature on strategy deals with the outer world and how to make sense of it. This is the conceptual side which is trained in MBA programs. To become excellent in that aspect you can trustfully follow those training programs. The inner world is however much more mystique.

Let us start with a simple experiment: Cross your hands and then cross them differently, cross your arms and now differently. One feels right the other wrong – right? The same goes for your senses (e.g. colors, smell, taste, etc.). It is neither right nor wrong, it is just a preference and it is yours. Might be different for others. Same with judgement. You look down from a bridge, tied with a rope by your feet: How does it feel – attractive or threatening? It is just a preference. The same goes for ideation. Where to go for the next holidays, beach or adventure?

The point is that due to personal preferences strategies turn out to be different. They influence how you view the dimensions of strategy and how you perform the process steps of strategy. E.g. living for the moment (time), scope of view (context), risk assertiveness (direction) or ignorance to weak signals (path) will hamper you as much as blind spots in observation (sense), general skepticism about opportunities (ideate), blindness to one’s intuition (choose), lack of confidence (mobilize), unquestioned routines (perform) or cheating yourself (achievement).

Many of those behaviors are inherited or learned routines. Preferences make pretty much sense as these routines make life easier in general. But if you are not aware of them, you can lose control over your fate. Some routines are even stronger than preferences, they are kind of unconscious conditional reflexes to certain stimuli. Conditioned unconscious reflexes jump directly from signal to action, no evaluation of the meaning of the signal (sense), no thinking of alternatives (ideation), no considerate decision making (choose), no planning (perform). Strategy needs the stimulation by relevant information, but we must maintain control of how we process this information.

The practical relevance can be seen in today’s management practice. Consultants or strategy books offer solutions (routines) to problems (stimuli). Some of these solutions become even broadly applied standards. The followers become legion, when they agree to the stimuli they follow the recommended action. It is the dream of every consultant to establish kind of such a conditioned reflex. E.g. commoditisation (stimuli) answered by “Blue Ocean Strategy” (routine).

By now, I hope you understand why your personality is as important for strategy as conceptual knowledge about strategy. When preferences are so important, it would be valuable to be aware of them, to understand which ones  are most relevant for you, how do they influence how you strategize, how to control existing preferences and how to develop new preferences for excellent strategies?

A first step might be to use the framework to challenge yourself by asking questions about each element. To come up with smart questions, the following three lead questions might guide you: Which preferences in strategizing do I have? How do they influence my strategizing? Or a bit more intuitively: What if …?.
Here are some examples:

Time:
How balanced do I spend my time thinking about the past, the present and the future? How strong does my past determine my future thinking without realising it? Do I only think forward on or also backwards from the future?
Context:
How often do I switch positions physically and mentally in order to look at my context?  Do I look at my context from inside-out or outside-in? What are the boundaries of my context – what is outside and why? Do others view my context differently and why? Can I redesign my context through mere imagination?
Direction:
Can I differentiate between my direction and my targets? How unique is my direction? Since when do I follow this direction consciously? How much is my direction influenced by others? Can others describe my direction? Do I practice scenario thinking, war gaming, strategy games or other methods?
Path:
How much does my future path resemble the past? Do I use a navigation system or a territory map and a compass to find my way? Do I have someone to challenge me? How do I react to changes in the context? Am I disciplined in project management?
Sense:
Do I use multiple information channels to cover the relevant context? Are my senses focused on the current situation or more broadly on everything that has to do with my direction or even broader on everything that inspires me? Do I balance big picture and important piece?
Ideate:
How much energy do I have to play with ideas? Which are my most successful idea killers? Do I balance analytic and intuition? What is my way of nurturing a new idea to grow? Do unique ideas energize me or drag me down? With how many ideas am I occupied? Am I willing to share ideas? Do I practice ideation methods?
Choose:
Do I choose based on facts or intuition? When am I ready to decide? How about my confidence after a decision?  Is my preferred choice direction or action? Do I publicly defend my decisions before deciding? Am I surprising anyone else or even myself with my decisions? What do I do with the neglected options? Does my decision method suit the type of decision?
Mobilize:
Do I struggle with taking action? Have my actions sometimes already started before the decision was made? What can suck my energy after past decisions? Why do others struggle to follow somebody else’s choice? How do I motivate others to join or take over? How do I come to peace with my decisions? What actually happens between choice and first action? Do I find silence and freedom in the special moment between decision and action?
Perform:
How balanced are planning and action? Is my long-term direction and my action planning in sync? Do I give up on ideas because I can’t imagine how to realize them? How do I plan activities when entering new areas? Do I build the bridge while driving? How creatively do I deal with roadblocks? Am I driven by my direction or by milestones? How do I realize progress? How are my stakeholders involved? Do I use kind of a balanced scorecard or more likely checklists to monitor? Do I practice kybernetics? Do I apply systems theory?
Achieve:
How do I recognize achievement and what does this tell me about what is important to me? Do I post-rationalize? How do I celebrate? What were my most powerful learnings after the last project?

Are those the right questions? Actually, it doesn’t matter. The point is:  have you started to take a step back and learn about you as strategist? You will find your own questions, answers and open points. This is where your road to excellence starts … not by copying blueprints!

The four dimensions of strategy (time, context, direction and path) and the steps of the strategy process (sense, ideate, choose, mobilize, perform and achieve) may serve as a structure to systematically improve your strategic personal capabilities.
Each of them is worth deeper investigation – Look out for coming blog posts!

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