Doing strategy isn’t the same as being strategic

This post was inspired by an exchange I had recently with a client of mine, Rob Cornish. Rob shared with me a post he’d recently written, and in it he made the point that not all corporate strategies are necessarily that strategic. In Rob’s post, he suggests that we should separate the noun ‘strategy’ from the adjective ‘strategic’.

This got me thinking about the difference between ‘doing strategy’ and ‘being strategic’. Interestingly, the most common thing I hear from leaders after my keynotes and workshops could be paraphrased as something along the lines of:

‘I wish we weren’t always so reactionary, we really need to be more strategic’

Now, this a very different proposition than saying ‘I wish we could spend more time doing strategy’. I don’t think most leaders have an underlying belief that they need to shorten their strategic planning cycles (though I would argue that in environments of heightened change and uncertainty, they possibly should) or that we need another annual leadership retreat (though this can be a great place to develop shared understanding). They are not talking about the noun ‘strategy’ but the adjective ‘strategic’. They’re talking about how people, across the organisation, show up each and every day.

The truth is, anyone can be strategic. Being strategic just means being thoughtful and considerate about the decisions we make. It’s based on the truism ‘the only constant in life is change’, which means the decisions (and strategies) made in the past may not always make sense in the future. Strategies and plans can get broken; being strategic just means applying ‘proactive awareness’ to identify where and when that might happen.

But given that strategies and plans play out across an organisation it doesn’t make sense for just a handful of people to be strategic. This skill is needed wherever decisions are made to align actions and effort with the long term goals of the organisation. And I don’t just mean the people who make those decisions about what, how and when the work gets done, I also mean the people who are doing the work. It is at the coalface that we are likely to find the earliest signs that conditions changing and it is therefore at the coalface we need people to be applying proactive awareness.

These early signs of change are what futurists sometimes call ‘weak signals’. Each signal in and of itself might not feel like much but a bunch of related signals together could be the precursor to a significant future change (just like a drop in temperature, a strengthening breeze and gathering clouds which could, when taken together, be the indicator of an impending storm).

Unfortunately, a lot of organisations do a fairly good job of getting employees to feel disassociated from the strategic planning process. As a result these employees often don’t necessarily think they are either qualified to, or have a responsibility for, being strategic. But unless organisations do something to change this perception and actively encourage and equip their people to be strategic those same organisations will be trapped in a cycle of reactivity. They won’t identify the weak signals, the storm will hit, people will be over-stretched and way too busy, and no-one will have the time to look up to see what’s coming next.

The need to be strategic is based on the truism: “The only constant in life is change.” Subsequently, we can’t assume the future (which is the world our decisions will play out in) will be the same as today (the world in which the decision gets made) or yesterday (the world of evidence as to what works and what doesn’t).