Developing Strategy vs. Implementation
Business leaders are under a ton of pressure to navigate through today’s difficulties and opportunities as markets shift and change in light of current unprecedented circumstances. We have to figure out what strategy is, how to develop one (and be ready to pivot when necessary), and how to implement it successfully. No part of that is easy, so we search for simple solutions—quite often prefabricated tools that promise to shoulder a large portion of the load.
I’ve previously written on what strategy is and the proliferation of out-of-the-box solutions for sale that can lead to strategy sickness (which we’ll delve into more deeply soon). Here, I want to take a quick look at why we tend to try those prefab solutions when current strategies aren’t providing results any longer and what we’re really buying when we do.
Develop or Implement?
Most business strategies fall broadly into three categories:
Doing something new.
Building on what you already do.
Reacting opportunistically to emerging possibilities.
The decision to do one of those three things doesn’t just emerge from nowhere. There has to be a reason you’d start a new thing instead of building on what you already do. Your strategy must have a genesis, and you have choices as to where yours is derived—developing a strategy yourself or implementing a prefab tool.
Those who sell off-the-shelf solutions understand that strategy development is difficult and know how to pique the interest of overworked and hungry business leaders with promises that your work is cut at least in half—no development necessary—and results are all but guaranteed. Their solutions are plug-and-play—or so they say—but, as we’ll see, that is simply not true. Those claims, however, are why the strategy business is so incredibly lucrative, and pre-packaged solutions find traction with business leaders for a number of reasons, including:
Owners, executives, and entrepreneurs often do not have the time or energy to do strategy work absent a crisis. With their focus on running the business day-to-day, any strategic thinking time they budget will most likely be expended on putting out fires. So they are willing to pay for someone else’s brainchild to fill the gap in their businesses.
The traditional consulting firms’ cost model typically puts their services out of reach of early-stage, small- to medium-sized organizations, and individual business units. So affordable, pre-packaged solutions are an acceptable substitute for most.
Traditional consulting firms’ comprehensive approach to strategy work often creates more problems than it solves. Again, most leaders have limited time and energy, so adding to the list of fires to extinguish seems counterintuitive.
Revolving Door
You may have experience with one or more of those yourself. Faced with a lack of results from your current strategy or a changing environment that threatened its efficacy, you may have found yourself perusing the shelves for a better option. But even with a new strategy comes the implementation—removing the remnants of the old strategy, ramping up the new, waiting to see if it will produce the results you need, and wondering how long it will be until you need to revisit the strategy shelves again.
When business leaders look to prepackaged solutions, their desire (and the promise of the solutions) is a plug-and-play strategy—one that will plug right in and go to work creating growth. The problem is that those sorts of solutions don’t actually exist. Off-the-shelf? Yes. Automated? No. The implementation of any strategy is difficult because there is no automated solution that simply plugs in and produces results. And if you decide on a prefab solution, you might actually end up doing more work reverse engineering it so you understand how it should work in your particular context.
The promises made by prefab solutions simply do not come to fruition, which is frustrating and sends leaders back to the shelves time and time again. It's no wonder we see so much strategy sickness. Leaders are looking for a better way than the revolving strategy door provides. There absolutely is a way to avoid the sickness that comes with this process, and it begins with understanding when and how things go sideways.
Coming up, we’ll discuss how strategy can become toxic for leaders…
When it is substituted for cultivating wisdom
When it's applied to the wrong situation
When it’s not used with humility
In the mean time, maybe it’s time to take another look at your strategy and ask yourself a few questions regarding how and why you landed on it. Was it for one of the reasons above (or something else similar), or was it one that considered your chosen objective, your context, and your moment? Implementation might be easier, but developing strategy builds skills and valuable wisdom that will benefit you and your business for years to come.
***If you’re ready to bypass the prefab solutions, Changegoat partners with investors, founders, and executives in the moments where leadership matters most. We don’t have a strategy for sale; we’ll help you ask better questions to unlock both personal growth and organizational performance.***
