What is “Being Strategic”?
Being Strategic is a difficult balancing act to achieve in any business or organisation.
We are buffetted by external forces outwith our control and the internal forces of culture and all sorts of day to day problems can accumulate to pull us away from our fundamental purpose and intentions as businesses.
So What is Being Strategic?
Today, we are surrounded by people that thrive on jargon. For many, it’s a special language for communicating with their peers, the technical vernacular that ends up as a barrier for the less informed. For others, it’s just a fallacy – a cloak of clever-sounding words that hides insecurity and, in actuality, doesn’t mean much at all.
I often talk about the value of ‘being strategic’, of how it’s something at which many leaders and managers should aspire to. But it’s perhaps in danger of sounding like jargon for a kind of zen-like state of perfect leadership. In fact, I use the words with a very specific meaning in mind.
What the clever folk at Harvard and M.I.T. have researched about Being Strategic.
Being strategic is not forming a strategy. Obviously, the process of planning is vital for successful leadership, but I’m looking beyond the mechanics of this process. It’s more about a personal mindset and positioning.
Henry Minzberg canoeing in recent year, as his twitter profile proves
Across the work done by business theorists C. K. Prahalad and Henry Mintzberg, they describe a painful position of having one foot in the present and one in the future.
In other words, it’s about maintaining both a focus on your fundamental purpose – the aims that unite and drive your organisation – and your control over how the operations are performing. The painful bit is that there will be friction between these short-term demands and long-term goals. Being strategic is to balance all sorts of competing priorities and, somehow, wrestling it all into a consistent direction – working to achieve your purpose.
The Practice of Being Strategic
The practice of being strategic is the subject of countless articles, books, courses and management models. I’m happy to discuss what that might mean for you, but it’s too vast a subject for a quick blog like this.
As for the results of being strategic, it’s an organisation that will be coherent in its actions and successful in its aims.
Being Strategic is centred around Strategic Intent.
Strategic Intent as a metaphor
In my experience of coaching and facilitating organisations to be strategic, there is a very useful learning point about ‘Strategic Intent’.
In the diagram I draw when delivering leadership training and organisational development programs, I picture this key practice like this. This uses the metaphor of your organisation being like a small boat on a vast ocean, setting out to reach a flagpole on the other side of the ocean. How do you do that?
Strategic Intent is the magic that gets us across a vast ocean.
Our skills of sailing will soon get honed. Our boat will be surely tested. Our clarity of where we want to be going will be the key thing we need to keep an eye on. The actual journey may require us to divert, go ashore, collaborate, and go with the wind. Yet most of all we must have the clarity of intent, to act like a rope pulling us because of the tension. The tension bourne out of our passion and fundamental purpose.
This is the skill Minzburg describes in his longer article of being 'ahead of the puck’.
My questions to you about Strategic Intent?
Does your organisation/business really know what is given in this planet to do? Its fundamental purpose, or has it drifted because of funding, culture or history?
Is your ability to read the ocean sharp? Or are you in a bubble feeding your colleagues information about the way the world works that is full of untested assumptions?
What is your keel like? - this is where i think the values of the organisation are best depicted.
Do you have a strategic framework that is alive to all, rememberable, and refreshed?
Do you also have an annual action plan that links to the strategy? - or has someone else written the business plan for you and it now sits in a draw.
Are you embracing major cultural shifts and getting ahead of them? Like the shift to Hybrid Working and all that means for the creating truely efficient hybrid meetings. Check out the resources and courses from my sister company PlacesWork, that can help you do better hybrid meetings.
How Duncan Wallace Associates could help you Being Strategic
I am always designing and facilitating strategic development days with boards and managers. I’ve been doing that since 2005.
‘I do not believe another facilitator would have done the job as well as you.
I believe the relaxed but focused way the day went was due to your guidance. It also made the day enjoyable for everyone especially with you having direct knowledge of XYZ Business and what it stands for.”
2. Many CEO’s and some Chairs of Boards work with me as their Coach, as they craft their organisation to be strategic.
“I just wanted to say thank you for the coaching session on Tuesday. I always feel uplifted and energised by our coaching sessions . I thought you'd like to know I woke up the following morning with lots of energy and ideas flying around and a key phrase in my head. Feel free to use as a strapline. ...put simply coaching with you feeds my soul. Have a great day ! Venue, background on pp board to follow later today or tomorrow. 1😊😊😊”
3, I design and lead complex culture change projects that help organisations re-align to being strategic.
Some of these are top level Leadership Development Programs.
4. I enable individuals to avoid burn out and find ways to improve their flow of time and energy.
If you think you or your organisation could be more strategic in its outlook or operations, I’m ready to talk about how to achieve that. Please feel free to get in touch.