What’s Holding Your Strategy Back? Clarity.

95% of your team are unaware of or don’t understand your strategy. While this stat is from a 2005 HBR article I’m pretty confident it’s still true today. One of my favourite tools when I first engage with an organisation is to simply ask everyone I meet what the organisation is focused on. You’ll be surprised how many different answers I can get, even among the leadership team. I ran a principles workshop with one startup where I set the task of coming up with “even/over” statements to describe their strategy, and every single member of the leadership team came up with different, conflicting, priorities.

Why does this happen? There are several challenges;

1. Everyone has a different definition of strategy
2. Everyone in your organisation has different context for strategy
3. How you develop strategy in the first place
4. Ensuring strategy is heard
5. Ensuring strategy is understood 

1. Defining Strategy

What does Strategy mean to you? What do you think it means to your team? Your CEO? Are you 100% sure you’re on the same page?  Before you start anywhere you need to get on the same page with the rest of the organisation.

• Research any past strategies and strategy processes - what has worked and what hasn’t?
• What are some of the deeply held beliefs that have come out of those processes that might need to be challenged?
• Have some internal conversations with key stakeholders about what they understand strategy to be - maybe ask about and discuss some of their favourite strategic tools or books.
• Consider running a strategic alignment workshop - Making sure everyone is in agreement on a definition of strategy as it relates to your organisation and creating understanding and alignment on your key strategic challenges.

As Tim Herbig said in his keynote at Product at Heart, “for whom is strategy trying to solve what problem and how would we know it was solved?”

If you need somewhere to start, you can read my definition of strategy and dig into my strategy toolkit.

2. Setting Context for Strategy

Strategy doesn’t exist in a vacuum - and this is where the Decision Stack can help. The Decision Stack connects the dots from the top down, but also from the bottom up. So from the top down your strategy is “a coherent set of choices about what we’re going to do to achieve our vision”, but from the bottom up your strategy is the reason why you’re focused on any given priority. You have to juggle developing strategy with keeping a zoomed out view of the whole stack.

Everyone in your organisation will also come to the strategy conversation with different biases and baggage. The CRO might just have had a conversation with one of your enterprise customers while you’ve just been doing discovery with a group of SME end-users. Since the first step in creating a strategy is being honest about the current state of your business and market, it’s your responsibility to make sure everyone has the same context for the strategy conversation ahead.

3. Developing your Strategy in the Open

Too often strategy is developed in an ivory tower. This is when the CEO and leadership team lock themselves away in the boardroom (or a fancy offsite) to strategise. No matter how well you run this process, looking at customer data, market trends, competitive challenges, making hypotheses and testing them - none of it matters if the outcome is a compressed powerpoint deck with a snappy headline. Because this deck inevitably misses all the intuitive leaps and connections you made along the way - and because it ignores the wealth of insight available in the rest of your organisation.

Great strategy is developed in the open, with as wide a team as possible. In a startup, this probably means the whole company is involved. As you scale this becomes unwieldy, and so inevitably direct democracy gets replaced with representative democracy - ensuring as many voices and perspectives are involved as possible. 

This is crucial for three reasons:

• The more people and perspectives you involve in the strategic development process, the more likely you are to unlock all those insights and develop a strategy that truly leverages your strengths and overcomes your weaknesses. 
• If strategy is “a coherent set of choices about what we’re going to do to achieve our vision” the more people you have involved in those choices the more coherent they will be.
• Developing your strategy in the open forces a level of clarity that will make communicating the strategy later so much easier. In the boardroom it’s easy to take certain definitions and insights for granted when developing your strategy - but once outside the room the lack of those insights makes that strategy really hard to understand. The first Polish encyclopaedia Nowe Ateny included this definition of a horse: “Horse: Everyone can see what a horse is”. But what if they can’t?

4. Ensuring your Strategy is Heard

Returning from your strategy offsite you call an all-hands meeting and excitedly present your new strategy to everyone. But then what? What about the new hire that joins the week after that all-hands? How do we make sure the team remembers the strategy a month later? 6 months later? A year later?

The Rule of 7 is a marketing principle that suggests a customer needs to see a message at least seven times before they make a purchasing decision. The principle is based on the idea that people are more likely to remember something they see frequently. It was developed in the 1930s by movie industry executives who discovered that a certain amount of advertising was needed to get people to buy tickets to their films. The principle is a reminder for all of us to create a well-rounded communication strategy that uses multiple channels and repeated messages to reach our entire organisation.

I find that you literally cannot repeat your vision and strategy too often. You might start feeling like a broken record but unless you repeat it at every opportunity it’s never going to be remembered by everyone on the team. This doesn’t mean you have to go through the whole strategy deck every time you start a meeting, but a simple check-in or reminder of the headline strategy can do wonders.

Think about your cadence of meetings at every level of the organisation as opportunities to remind everyone of the strategy, how things are going, and why the current thing they’re focused on matters (if only there was a Decision Stack to help):

• Embed the vision and strategy in your onboarding documents and process - and keep it up to date! It’s critical to getting new hires on the same page as everyone else as early as possible.
• At your all-hands, it can be as simple as having a holding slide with the vision and strategy on it while everyone is getting ready.
• At your quarterly updates, it can be as simple as reminding everyone of the vision and strategy, showing how the previous and coming quarter’s efforts have impacted or will impact them.
• At the team level, your weekly/bi-weekly catchups and monthly updates should always explicitly connect the dots between what you’re focused on now and your vision, strategy, and objectives.
• If you’re co-located or hybrid, print your vision and strategy on posters and hang them in the office.

You simply can not repeat any of this too often.

5. Ensuring your Strategy is Understood

As John Maeda says, “clarity comes from transparency and understanding.” It’s not enough to just be transparent about your strategy and broadcast it but you have to make sure it’s understood too.

Even if you’re co-creating your strategy at some point your organisation scales to where everyone can’t be in the discussion up front, and so will need to be brought along after the fact. This involves focusing on clarity and storytelling.

Clarity in strategy comes from simplifying and reducing the strategy into as concise a message as possible - which also helps people remember it. While developing the strategy you will have a huge document or deck with all the supporting data, insights, and conviction behind it. But the strategy itself should boil down to just a sentence or two.

Then, as Petra Wille suggests in her excellent talk on storytelling, think about developing different ways to describe your strategy - 150 words like “We want to X, in order to Y, because Z”, 900 words that paint a more complete picture, and 2,400 words that tell the full story. 

Sketchnote by David Axelrod from Petra Wille's talk

How do we Know our Strategy is Clear?

The best sign that your vision or strategy is landing is when your team starts actively referencing them — whether to justify a decision or to push back on an idea. Success! Your vision and strategy are now directing daily decisions!

Another sign is when you stop saying No quite as often - because your stakeholders, peers, and team already know what the focus is and stop coming up with ideas that don’t align with that focus.

If all else fails, ask your team. Don’t just ask if they know your vision and strategy though - ask them to describe it in their own words. In my own startup I was known for asking random members of the team to explain our strategy to the group - a pop quiz that not only reminded everyone in the room but scared them just enough to try and remember it for next time…

Living and Breathing Strategy Stops it from Stagnating

The best part of continuously talking about your vision and strategy? It brings them to life in your organisation and takes them out of that powerpoint deck and into every daily decision.

This also means the strategy itself becomes a living idea instead of something set in stone and displayed on a shelf. Because a culture of repeatedly referring back to vision and strategy as reasons for making decisions is one that opens itself up to challenge when new information or insights come to light that challenge those decisions - or the strategy itself. As Arne Kittler points out, the more senior you are, the more your emphasis on providing clarity influences the everyday culture in your organisation that "makes it easy, safe, and ideally rewarding for anyone asking for clarity to do so".

How are you making your vision and strategy clear in your organisation?