What is “Strategy”?
According to LinkedIn, there are 1,100,000 people with the word "Strategist" in their profile. I've worked with quite a few of them, and found that they produce a dizzying array of ideas, all too frequently taking the form of a forty-page PowerPoint document with a name like "Brand Definition Model". If you've ever read such a document and wondered, "Is this the strategy? What slide is the strategy on?", then this is the article for you.
I’m going to spend the next 700 words defining "strategy," giving you a few examples, and talking about how to craft a good one. We'll also look at a few other definitions, and talk about why I think mine is more useful.
Defining Strategy
An excellent place to start with any such question is the free encyclopedia:
Wiki: a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty.
I like to put it a little more simply:
A flexible plan to use available resources to meet a goal.
This definition is useful because it is general enough to encompass many of the ideas you likely associate with strategy, but gives them clarity and focus. At the end of the day, strategy work is not about agreeing on an idea, it’s about meeting a goal.
This definition also hints at why the role of the strategist can be so vast: defining a goal, gathering the information needed to form a plan, and undertaking the vast social enterprise of persuading others to follow that plan, are all part and parcel of creating and implementing a strategy.
An important footnote here is that the purpose of a strategy is to guide human behavior. If a strategy is so complex that people can’t remember it, or requires people to take actions they don’t have the skill or will to take, it won’t function well. It’ll be a strategy, but not a good or useful one.
Two examples of strategies
An arena where almost all of us follow the same exact strategy is driving a car. You might not think of this as a place for strategy, because it’s (usually) not a competitive space, but it’s a context totally shaped by a common goal, and a common approach to meeting that goal.
When we're driving, we want to get where we're going quickly, which also means safely. Our resources are limited to a car, a turn signal, and a horn. There's a single plan that shapes how we use those resources to meet that goal: we try to act predictably.
We can articulate that strategy is, "Reach our destination quickly and safely, by maneuvering and signaling predictably". Or, we might just focus on the plan: "Act predictably."
This plan is flexible: Almost every aspect of driving is shaped by this goal and plan to meet it. Speed limits keep us moving at a similar pace; turn signals help those around us predict what we'll do next; signs, signals, and road markings help us predict how others will act, and help others predict what we'll do, too. And because we all act predictably, we can safely move at much higher speeds, helping us all get where we’re going faster.
This is the epitome of an effective strategy: accomplishing multiple goals, by providing a flexible plan applicable in almost every situation, all in a clear and memorable package.
A second second, extremely trendy and surprisingly instructive example of strategy is winning the Wordle (which I’ve written a whole article about!).
To paraphrase that article: the end goal of Wordle is to guess the word, and your obvious sub-goal is to get information about what letters could be in the word and where they could go. Your main resource constraint is that you only get six turns to find the right word, which puts these goals at odds: the word that is most likely to be the answer is also the one that will provide you the least information, and the one with the most information will have the lowest odds of being a winner. You have to prioritize, and decide when to switch from one goal to the other.
The strategy I use is to avoid reusing any letters I know anything about until I have at least 3 yellows, and especially avoid reusing greens until I’m ready to make my final guess, which is almost never before turn 5. That way I can learn as much as possible, so I won’t win fast, but I’ll win eventually— a balanced approach with a high rate of success, and one easy enough that my dumb meat computer can actually contain and implement it.
Building a strategy
If you're in need of a strategy, that means you have a goal you don't quite know how to meet, or you have a plan that isn't flexible enough to guide all those involved in meeting it.
The place to start is clearly articulating your goal. This can be a little tricky, because there are usually countless goals at every level of granularity. We recommend taking your highest-level goal—which, let's be honest, is almost certainly "Increase profitability—and take it one step down. How will YOUR product or practice do that?
Once you've established your goal, it's time to create a general plan. In branding, we recommend starting with the words "Build a reputation for...". There are many ways to answer this question, and I’m happy to chat about what those ways could be.
As a check to make sure you've done it right, you want to test for flexibility. Is this big enough that everyone I want to influence could make sense of it? This is part of why we recommend the "Build a reputation for..." formulation: almost anyone at your company can see how their own actions might impact the company’s reputation, and they can use this tool to make their own decisions without you having to make those decisions for them.
Lastly, you might find that you do need a more granular strategy for a specific group or activity within your company, such as naming, writing, design, or UX. We recommend you go through this process again, treating the "plan" part of your brand strategy as the goal of your naming, writing, etc. strategy. "To build our reputation, our writers will..."
With your flexible plan in hand, you’re ready to reshape your world.
Other definitions of “strategy”
Did you reach this article by googling "strategy definition"? I’m blown away that I’m that high up in the search rankings. Well, let's take a look at some of the definitions I found when I executed just such a search.
HBR: A business strategy is a set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making.
This is conceptually right, but it stops just short of the most important piece, which is having a clear goal. Why is this pattern of decision-making desired? Without a clear answer to that question, the "communicated and adopted" step will be quite challenging.
Forbes: A strategy is a framework for making decisions about how you will play the game of business.
There’s a lot to say about this, but let's focus on just one word: "Framework." I am adamant that a framework is never a strategy, it is a tool to help you reach one or to justify it to others. In my experience, nobody understand how to actually use a framework to reshape their behavior. Clear, directive plans articulated in plain language will always achieve better results. To be blunt, focusing on a framework is the number-one reason that strategies fail to actually come to life.
Strategy.net: Strategy is everything required to reach the best results.
"Everything" is pretty broad, isn't it? If I'm going to reach the best results, I need mental focus, which is facilitated by proper nourishment. Is my team's diet part of my brand strategy? What about their sleep schedule? Joking aside, this definition, like many in the branding space, is so broad as to be useless: if a strategy could be anything, it might as well be nothing.
Want to pin your strategy down, or pitch your definition of strategy?