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Goals Without a Strong Strategy is Pure Foolishness
Do you ever feel like you're spinning your wheels, constantly setting goals but never quite reaching them?
Maybe you want to lose weight, start a business, lead a team to hit a key business goal or learn a new skill, but no matter how hard you try, you just can't seem to make progress. Well, the truth is, setting goals without a strong strategy is pure foolishness. It's like trying to navigate a ship without a map - you may end up somewhere, but it's unlikely to be where you wanted to go or that you will get there particularly fast.
What is “Strategy”?
It is such an overloaded term that for many people it now just sounds like corporate jargon.
In the book Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt states, “The core of strategy work is: discover the critical factors in a situation and design a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”
The authors of Play to Win explain that “strategy is about making specific choices to win.”
This all sounds pretty simple, but why does Strategy matter and how can we put a strategy into action in our lives?
Why Strategy Matters
For me, Strategy matters because it turns out that many of the goals we want to accomplish are hard. Often really hard. It is so easy to define aspirations such as, “Become the best company in the world!” or “Get a job at a FAANG company!” Thinking about these aspirations is really fun. It is exciting to imagine the world in which we accomplish our goals and what that could look like.
Unfortunately, thinking about how we can accomplish these goals is much more difficult, so often people don’t. Or if they do, they don’t actually think about whether their plan (aka Strategy) actually has a high probability of success.
In short, strategy matters because, without an understanding of the specific choices you plan to make to overcome the difficulties of achieving your goal, you almost certainly will not find success.
A Simple Strategic Framework
State Your Winning Aspiration
To borrow a term from Play to Win, step one in the strategic framework I use is to define your winning aspiration. This is a short statement about what you want to achieve.
Nike’s winning aspiration is, “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. *If you have a body, you are an athlete.”
A career-winning aspiration might be, “Become the most valuable data scientist within your company.”
Or, a personal winning aspiration could be, “Improve my fitness to be able to run a marathon.”
This is the first step because you need to know what winning means to you in order to define your Strategy.
Define the Critical Factors
Step 2 is listing out all the critical factors to achieve your winning aspiration. I like to think of these as the core challenges or critical assumptions.
In this step, list out everything you can think of. For example, if you desire to win a marathon the critical factors could include:
Maintain motivation for training
Sign up for a marathon
Get the appropriate running gear
Understand the nutrition needed to run a marathon
Find the time to train
Build a training plan based on best practices
And many more
Sort Your Critical Factors
Once you have listed out all the critical factors you can think of, sort them from least likely to happen to most likely.
This is important because we want to spend our time first on the hardest challenges we see to achieving our goal. From our list above it could look sorted like this:
Maintain motivation for training
Find the time to train
Build a training plan based on best practices
Understand the nutrition needed to run a marathon
Get the appropriate running gear
Sign up for a marathon
Prune Your Critical Factors
Great strategy doesn’t try to address every possible problem but rather focuses efforts and resources on the critical factors. This is the point at which we prune our list to truly include only the challenges we see as undeniably critical to our success.
These also need to actually be true challenges that are unlikely to be overcome without a strategy. You likely don’t need to overthink whether you can sign up for a marathon. So our list might end up as:
Maintain motivation for training
Find the time to train
Build a training plan based on best practices
Coherent Action
Now, go through your sorted list above and lay out the actions you see you would need to take to overcome these critical factors.
These actions should leverage your unique competitive advantages and be as simple as possible. This, in my opinion, is the meat of Strategy.
At this point, you don’t need to define exactly what you will do but rather lay out the action plan. For example, coherent action for “maintain motivation for training” would include some brainstorming on how you personally tend to be motivated. Maybe you realize that you are most motivated when you have someone training with you. So your coherent action to achieve this critical action would be convincing a friend to join you on your marathon journey.
At this point, you don’t need to figure out how to achieve this action of convincing a friend. You just need to know that is what you see as necessary to overcoming your challenge.
Iterate
At this point, you’ve laid out a Strategy that has a winning aspiration, a prune list of true critical factors you need to overcome, and the action you see to be required to meet these challenges. Great!
Now, you need to ask yourself does this look like a winning strategy? Do I think I really laid out the right critical factors? Do I believe I can find a way to accomplish the actions I’ve defined?
For example, you might find it impossible to convince a friend to train for a marathon with you.
If any parts of your strategy seem to break down, then go back a tweak it! Maybe you need to even change your winning aspiration if you can’t find a plausible strategy to succeed.
If you look at your strategy and love it, then start executing! But don’t forget, as you execute, you will learn, and as you learn, you should continue to update and iterate on your strategy. It should always be evolving.
I hope this helps us all avoid just stating our goals, but actually putting a strategic plan in place that maximizes our chances of winning!