Communicating Strategy Simply

Last week, I talked about the benefits of having a simple and focused strategy. Of course, simple is different from simplistic. Even simple strategies come from rigorous and nuanced analysis—it’s actually quite complex! 

But the reason the nuanced strategy needs to synthesize into simplicity is that human beings need to coordinate to effectively implement it. Hence, a cousin to having a simple strategy is having simple communication from leaders about it. 

Unfortunately, many organizations don’t get this right. In Unleashed, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss write: 

“This scale of leadership depends on people understanding the strategy well enough to inform their own decisions with it. In our experience, too many companies are held back by strategic confusion below the most senior ranks. Said differently, strategy guides discretionary behavior to the limit of how well you communicate it.”

What’s worth underlining in that passage is “strategic confusion below the senior ranks.” That is, even if the strategy is clear, common knowledge of it may not be. 

One of the basic things that gets in the way of clarity is jargon and fancy talk. Chip and Dan Heath put this well in Made to Stick: “To a CEO, ‘maximizing shareholder value’ may be an immensely useful rule of behavior. To a flight attendant, it’s not.” 

In The Knowing-Doing Gap, professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton write: “Managers are often just as guilty as academics of using complex, incomprehensible jargon to express ideas that could be expressed in simple language.”

In contrast, they write, “Simple talk is valuable because it is more likely to lead to action. It is less possible to second-guess or dispute simple, direct ideas. One may disagree with a simple idea or a simple philosophy, but that is transparent at the outset.”

A Helpful Framework: Strategic Principle

Here, the literature argues for strategy communications that sound simple and are clear enough to guide people to the right actions without precise direction. 

A framing for this that I really like is the strategic principle. In the Harvard Business Review article “Transforming Corner-Office Strategy into Frontline Action,” Bain & Company consultants Orit Gadiesh and James Gilbert define the strategic principle as “a memorable and actionable phrase that distills a company’s corporate strategy into its unique essence and communicates it throughout the organization.”

One example they give is from Walmart: “Low prices, every day.” Another is from GE: “Be number one or number two in every industry in which we compete, or get out.”

While the phrases are simple, they reflect complex thinking. The GE strategic principle, for example, could just as soon be written as: As a conglomerate, our only rationale for being in an industry has to be that we have the capabilities required to be number one or number two. Else, it’s not an optimal use of investment capital, and we should get out of that industry. 

But that doesn’t fit on a poster. 

At the same time, strategic principles provide direction that everyone in the organization can understand and act upon.

Another way to think about the principle is what you might say at the end of a long speech on the strategy. And it’d probably include a phrase like When in doubt ... or All else equal ... or If you could only prioritize one thing….

A classic example of this is British Admiral Horatio Nelson’s instructions to his fleet before the Battle of Trafalgar: “But, in case Signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood, no Captain can do very wrong if he places his Ship alongside that of an Enemy.”    

Translation: In the absence of further instruction, just get aggressive. 

In Practice: What A Simple Message Looks Like

In Made to Stick, the authors suggest that “Simple = Core + Compact.”

In Making Great Strategy, professors Jesper Sorensen and Glenn Carroll write: “A strategy message should be accessible and comprehensible to all, which means it needs to be simple and direct.”

For me, the test is to explain your team or organization’s strategy to someone who has no clue what you do. Then, ask if they understand it. If not, it’s probably not as clear or simple as you need it to be.