Being a Stealth Strategist
It’s a weird thing as a strategy consultant, but it seems like I spend a lot of time talking people out of strategic planning. The reason why: it’s far better to be doing strategy than to be talking about strategy.
And usually, when leaders announce that they’re going to have a strategy conversation, people start thinking and acting funny.
One of the first things that often happens is that people ask, “What is the definition of ‘strategy’?” It’s definitely a reasonable question, but it’s more likely to lead to a college-level semantics seminar rather than a helpful framing to develop a useful strategy.
A second thing that can happen is that “strategy” gets people thinking “process”— usually a process that lasts months and—painstakingly—involves everyone who might have a perspective.
Finally, using the word “strategy” usually raises the stakes—it sounds like something that will be chiseled on stone tablets and brought down from the mountain. Hence, strategy becomes something people must fight over, lest their department or pet project lose status or funding).
For all of those reasons, it might be useful to think about another approach: stealth strategy, or doing strategy without ever telling people that’s what you’re up to.
It might be saying “Let’s spend an hour logging and prioritizing ideas for What’s it going to take for us to be more successful going forward? and What’s going to get in the way?”
An hour-long conversation about those questions can often deliver 80% of the value of a “process” (not least because it takes time to design and schedule a process).
A stealth approach to strategy could also be integrating strategy questions into your normal 1:1 conversations. I had an idea over the weekend about ways we might drive more impact. …What do you think of that framework?
After just a few of these meetings, there’s likely to be greater strategic understanding among the team such that whenever a “strategy” is declared, getting everyone on board with it will likely be easier.
The stealthy approach could just be bringing up the same topics in meeting after meeting. In Organizational Culture and Leadership, former MIT professor Edgar Schein describes how useful this can be: “The most powerful mechanisms that founders, leaders, managers, and parents have available for communicating what they believe in or care about is what they systematically pay attention to. This can mean anything from what they notice and comment on to what they measure, control, reward, and in other ways deal with systematically.”
The book CEO Excellence provides a good example of this. The authors write, “At Siam Cement, Kan Trakulhoon used [a question] to bolster his culture of innovation. As he visited various sites, he always made it a point while on the shop floor to ask, ‘What are you working on to improve your process and your productivity?’ [...] When he came back for his next visit [...] you can bet everyone on the shop floor was ready with an impressive answer.”
It’s hard to ask the same question over and over without people orienting their work to provide a constructive answer!