Rearing Horses And Flashing Sabres

During the presentation of The Strategy...

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."
Sun Tzu

The man who was about to ask a question was blinking. He wanted to make sure that his question was not a silly one or, even worse, incorrect.
He checked. He checked again. No, it was not there, he was sure.
So he raised his hand and asked “but where is your strategy?”. “I just told you!” was the reply.
The man indicated that he had, indeed, just been presented a list of things but he still would like to know where the strategy was. “I just told you!” came the answer.
The man gave up. He nodded and politely waited until the presentation was over.

The incident had a simple root cause, not everybody understands what strategy is but everybody loves the word.
Strategy.
And add the prefix Global to that and you have the wet dream of every manager, team lead, unit head, ops officer and what have you.
To create a document with your name under it that has the title Global Strategy.
To be right up there with Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Patton and Montgomery.
To be authoritative on meta level, to shape the future of the organisation, to be mounted on a rearing horse while directing your divisions with a grand sweep of your sabre...

And just what is strategy, anyway? Just a vaguely described list of what you are going to do, right? No need for plans, since that would be tactical (also a grand name, but not as sweet as Strategy) so whatever you write down is always correct.
Hey, you are correct by default since you are making the very root of the plan. You can't be wrong.
And you'll end up as the author of the, ah, Global Strategy.
Now that will look good on any CV.

If only that man would stop looking at me like I'm stupid or something...

That man wasn't me, by the way. It was somebody who's job it is to create designs at tactical level based on a strategy. He knows what a strategy is since he spends a lot of time looking at one.

Follow up:

Failure and definition.

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."
Elmore Leonard

The example shows two reasons why strategies can fail. And usually fail to be one.

It is seen as the summit of what is achievable in a leading role. Everybody wants to write one. The word has such a special attraction that it is almost inevitable that a lot of bad strategies get written.
The other problem is that not many people bother to find out or try to understand what a strategy is.

OK, then what is a strategy?

This of course varies a lot depending on what kind of strategy you are talking about, or rather, what environment you want a strategy for.
A military strategy is different from a business strategy, I hope. And a strategy for a football team is not the same as one for a finance department.
Of course, they do share some basic concepts but they are written from a different perspective and with a different goal.

Function and magic.

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
Winston Churchill

And the goal is what defines the basis of the strategy; form follows function. So the first question you want to ask yourself is 'what should my strategy do?'.

Many things have been said about that and there are several ways you can go about defining your strategy. To keep it simple; your strategy should tell you who you are and what you want to do, as an organisation.
Well, I'm assuming that it's for an organisation, if you want to write a strategy for yourself please don't let me stop you.

Your strategy should have a clear purpose; it should be set out to achieve a goal. A lot of times the goal is to increase or create value. From your strategy it should be clear how you feel about things, you could almost see it as the character of your organisation. It is also a self-definition and it tries to define relevant elements around you.
And of course every strategy is focused on the future. You'll have to try to predict the future and your reaction on that.

This is probably why it has such a magical attraction.

In 'The Strategy Process: Concepts and Contexts' James Quinn wrote that "a strategy is the pattern or plan that integrates an organization's major goals, policies, and action sequences into a cohesive whole”.
He might be going a little over the top there (a lot of definitions do) but that would indeed be a perfect strategy. Usually a little less detailed will also do. But if you for example feel that the action sequences are also fine at tactical level you should make sure that everything you put outside the strategy is at least referred to. You don't have to write down particular services that you want to offer, as matter of fact you shouldn't, but you can define your role as service provider.

The strategies for a strategy.

“When you're prepared, you're more confident. When you have a strategy, you're more comfortable.”
Anonymous

There are many ways to get to a strategy and finding a method that works for you can be a challenging task but it is something that needs to be done. Having a good strategy will save you a lot of work later.

This is probably why a lot of wannabe Napoleons give up; it's too much like work and there are rarely white horses involved. It's quite low on flashing sabres too.

So, let's take a look at the method promoted by ITIL v3. It's not the only way but certain a popular way.
It's the four P's of strategy.
(certain school of thoughts think there are five P's but we'll be modest)

Position
Perspective
Patterns
Plan

(good P's, eh? You can almost see the diagram in the Power Point already.)

Position is where you try to determine your position in the market. Even if you think you do not have a market, maybe you are an internal service provider, you should still look at the people you provide your service to, the other organisations they can go to instead, how popular you are compared to those others, etc. Where do you stand in your field? Are you a leader or a follower? Who are your competitors? And come to think of it; what is your field?

It is tempting in this part to start writing about what you want to change, how you are completely going to blast that competition and become the market leader. Maybe even the Global Market Leader.
But you shouldn't. All you are trying to do here is get some insight and write that down. You can put in some conclusions if you like, in the tone of “there is plenty of room for us to grow” but don't put in any plans. You have four P's so use them.

Perspective is where you look at your relation with and your position in your own organisation. Maybe there are a lot of departments that are doing work for you. Or maybe there are a lot that depend on you. Who in your organisation has influence on what you do? Who can take decisions about you? Who gets influenced by what you decide?

Both the P's so far have been about finding out who you are. This is more important then most people realise and you'd be surprised about how many people don't know the answers to those questions.
In 'The Art Of War' Sun Tzu concluded that it is just as important to know yourself as it is to know the enemy. And yes, that book is still very relevant to modern strategies.

But after those first two issues about yourself it is time for some serious soul seeking: Patterns.

In this phase you try to see the patterns in your past actions. You try to see what you are good at and why (so you can do it again) and what you are not good at and why (so you can either improve or do something else instead).
To do this you need to be honest and you should have set up a way of collecting data. Read reports, look at results, read more reports, talk to people, then read some more reports and see the patterns. Write down what you see; what goes right every time and why. What are the things that you simply can't seem to be able to do and what causes that. Again, it is tempting to make recommendations or even to write down action point but save that for the last P. All you want to do now is find out what your strengths and weaknesses are and making sure that your conclusions are backed up by facts.

Maybe you've noticed that I use the phrase 'write it down' a lot. That is because you should! For two reasons in particular; if you write it down you are thinking about it. It helps you put things in focus and perspective and it forces you to organise your thoughts.
The second reason is that all those points are part of your actual strategy that must be published. Remember that all important document that will make you the star of the show? The one that makes the average manager forget about growth pills? The, here it comes, Global Strategy?
Well that is what you are going to put in it.
That is where you tell everybody what you are. That is where you create the character of your organisation.

Of course, you don't need to list all the mishaps that you found when looking for patterns, nor do you need to name every single employee that is influenced by your actions. Let's keep it strategic, shall we?

And then the final P. The plan.
That is entirely up to you. But by now you must have come to some logical conclusions about what you need to do. You probably had a burning need to write down what needs to be done when you were looking for patterns. You might have seen that some lines of communication are not strong enough when defining your perspective. You might have curled your toes when having a good look at your position.
Now is the time to write it all down.

But keep in mind that you don't want to go into too much detail; from your strategy, which should be a framework, comes the tactical part. On that level you, or others, are designing processes, services, structures, work flows, etc. with clear goals. Goals that they need to be able to define based on your strategy.
But also don't get lazy at this point and push too much down to the tactical level, that will lead to badly defined targets and that will ultimately lead to failure.

Good, bad and good luck.

“What do you want to achieve or avoid? The answers to this question are objectives. How will you go about achieving your desire results? The answer to this you can call strategy.”
William E Rothschild

If well written, people should be nodding their heads by the time they reach your plan. Your plan should be a logical conclusion of the first parts. You have clearly stated what you are and what you are capable of and what you think needs to be done and why.

If badly written, or incomplete (a lot of people have the tendency to skip right to the plan) chances are your beautiful presentation will lead to endless discussion, badly planned projects at tactical level or, probably the worse of all, your people will ignore you and your strategy.

So, get your thinking cap on, break out your best keyboard and write a structured documents with arguments based on facts. It's not an easy task but you'll save a lot of work later.

“Good luck.”
Me.