Introducing Strategy: A Simple 3-Step Guide

Help your team grasp the concept of Strategy in 3 easy steps

Have you sat through one of those long lectures on what is Strategy at the workplace? or do you belong to a workplace where this discussion does not even exist! Well worry not - I have developed a simple process myself which I believe can help any team to walk towards the concept of strategy from where they are currently.

It is important to note that everyone most probably has a different view of what Strategy is - so giving one lesson that fits everyone's approach might not work. It is like everyone is wearing a medium size t-shirt irrespective of their body - I am pretty sure a lot of them will not be comfortable.

Pre-requisites

Time required: For this exercise you ideally need 60 mins.

Participants: Do not have more than 2 pizza rule participants (number of people who can comfortably share 2 full pizzas)

Location: Ideally done in person but can also be done over a video call

Preparation: No preparation required from participants

Agenda: The agenda of meeting should be - Discussing our strategy (do not give more details)

Step 1: Ask, what is our current strategy?

Start with asking the participants, what is our strategy & ask them to write it down in 2-3 lines.

Not what is strategy or what do you mean by strategy. Make it more concrete and ask - what do you think our current strategy is? Ask the team not to blindly copy the strategy statement (well I don’t think you need to worry about it as most probably most of them will not remember your current strategy statement - not a good sign but most probable scenario).

In case you are doing this in person, ask them to write this on a piece of paper or sticky notes and then put it on a white board.

In case you are doing it over a video call, ask them to ping you directly and not to share on group chat.

The idea is that they should not look at each other’s answers while answering, otherwise it leads to groupthink!

Ideally this should be done in 5 minutes and no more. People should not have to take longer than that to write 2-3 lines on what they think is the current strategy.

Step 2: Discuss responses

This step has to be done with caution and no judgement. This is key to keeping your audience engaged.

Collate all the responses and you should most probably see a few of the below clusters emerge:

• Confusing objectives as strategy

  • Achieving rank 1

  • Gaining market share

• Vague ambitions as strategy

  • Serving our customers best

  • Being best in class

• Action plan as Strategy

  • Driving xx initiatives

• True Strategy (rare but you should be glad if you encounter this)

  • Serving xx customer segment with yy solutions to serve zz needs

The responses should be de-identified (we are not here to play gotcha!). Ask the group on why we believe that ambition or goal is strategy. Try and understand where they are coming from. Try to have a discussion of 20-30 minutes to understand different perspectives. Do not, I repeat do not yet introduce the concept of strategy.

Step 3: Introduce concept of Strategy

Now is the critical part. After the first 30 minutes of discussion it is now time to introduce the concept of Strategy. Now here you can go two ways. The choice here is completely yours but my guidance is as follows.

Choose concept 1: If you work in a corporation that has the resources and will-power to truly go for the road less travelled.

Choose concept 2: If you work in a corporation that understands its position as the 4th, 5th or 6th player in the market and just wants to do better.

Concept 1: Where to play and how to win coupled with differentiation

This concept of strategy is based on Roger Martin or Michael Porter’s school of thought which defines strategy as choosing a unique set of activities to create differentiation and sustainable competitive advantage and in turn creating more value for the customers. Where to play and how to win are key questions in this concept. You can play the video below to introduce this concept.

Concept 2: Diagnosis, guiding policy and coherent action

Richard Rumelt’s concept of strategy is rooted more in realism and talks about understanding the key challenges or opportunities facing the business (diagnosis), creating a guiding policy to address these challenges and finally creating a coherent plan to put this in motion. You can play the following video to introduce this concept.

Note: These two concepts are overlapping and not discrete. If your group is smaller and more mature, it might be worth playing both the videos to them as well (not recommended for most groups though)

These videos will take around 10 mins each. Post this you can open the forum for discussion. Field questions from the group. Do not try to be over defensive about the concept. Clarify as many questions as you can (if you do not have an answer, keep the question for later). If needed, book a 90 minute meeting so that you can spend more time on this discussion.

I have observed that people more often than not straight up realise that they indeed have been thinking about strategy wrong or at least knew about it but just got caught up in everyday corporate jargon.

In the last 5 minutes, ask people to once again now write in 2-3 lines - what is our strategy? Ask them to reflect on their initial answer and the answer now as they leave the meeting. Let the question hang so that they ruminate on it.

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Quick Recap

1. Step 1: Ask, What is our Strategy? (5 mins)

2. Step 2: Discuss responses (20-30 mins)

3. Step 3: Introduce concept of Strategy (20-30 mins)

Well that was my 3 step guide to introduce the concept of strategy to your teams. I will bring a follow up to this later in terms on how to elaborate on this further with your teams via concrete examples. The introduction of strategy needs to be a deliberate and slow process which should be repeated over multiple sessions. We are not in a rush here, are we?

Hope you had fun reading this. Do share your thoughts and comments. See you next week.

-Strategy Shots