A Strategy vs a Plan
Strategy
- Coherent & Integrative: the choices made and actions executed are meant to bolster each other (they should be multiplicative) and are part of a larger design
- It has a theory (or hypothesis): going after something no one else sees, or predicting trends and building to a need that doesn’t exist yet but should when you get there
- Outcome focused
- Uncomfortable: taking steps into an uncertain future
- The chance to win
Plan
- Disparate: choices made and actions executed are independent and do not add up to more than their sum (they are additive at best)
- Not a theory: outcomes provable in advance
- Cost / problem focused
- Comfortable: short-term forecasting can be done with confidence
- The chance to lose: while you’re planning, someone else is strategizing, and if they win, you’re stuck with whatever’s left-over (in a zero-sum game)
In this light, “Strategic Planning” is nonsensical / oxymoronic
A Strategy should be relatively short: it should fit on 1 page
- Here’s the goal / the aspiration
- Where we’re choosing to play
- How we want to win
- Capabilities we need to have in place
- Management systems needed
- Here’s the logic laid out
- Assumptions: what needs to be true internally and externally for the strategy to succeed
- Adjust the Strategy has new information comes in
These categories sound similar to the Business Model Canvas
Martin also presents strategy generation guidance in visual form as a cascade of iterative questions:
Strategy x Cynefin
What grabbed me was “strategy has a theory”, which when examined with the Cynefin lens, places Strategy squarely in the Complex domain. The Complex domain is where theories are tested by safe-to-fail trials, and the advice is: before you conduct a trial,
- on success, how will you amplify on the next iteration?
- on failure, how will you dampen the next iteration?
A Strategy provides guiding principles – In Cynefin language, guiding principles are called Enabling Constraints and they exist in the Complex domain.
