The Practice of Strategy

Strategy is what connects our aspirations with our actions and our intended outcomes. In this issue, we look at how to create strategy by design.

We begin this Fall into Strategy Series with a look at strategy itself. We’re going to define it, advocate for a particular approach to create it by design, and illustrate how to might put this into practice.

Where Strategy?

We often think of strategy as something that is done in boardrooms or retreats, but it’s really something that happens in the hallways, Zoom calls, clinics and staff rooms.

Strategy takes place anywhere and at any time a decision is made that aligns activities with our aspirations. That’s strategy in practice. Don’t let the corporate consultant-speak drown out the important conversations to be had about strategy. Strategy is what connects your ideas and intentions to your actions and allocations. It’s about what you want for your organization, what kind of impact you want, and developing a plan to make it real.

That’s why it’s worth the time, care and attention.

Strategic Design: A Term For Making Strategy

Strategic design involves shaping a strategy to be practiced so that it generates impact. It doesn’t deliver the strategy, rather it sets it up to be enacted. The effectiveness of your strategy will rise and fall with the quality of your design. Do a poor job of designing for what you want, need, have, and are required to do, you’ll get a poor outcome.

Strategic design is not just about planning, it’s about practicing. What separates it from traditional planning is that it’s practice-oriented; it connects the plan with its implementation and evaluation. In other words: you’re not just left with a plan, but a pathway to follow it and know when you’ve got to your destination.

Strategic design involves taking us through a series of deltas — change spaces where we open ourselves up to ideas and then transform them into actions. These connected deltas are embedded within a larger one, the systemic context. Collectively, these are shaped into plans, learning, and actions that lead to impact.

So what does this look like in practice? We start off with asking questions.

Inquiry

At its core, inquiry is about asking questions about what we see, sense, and experience. Its practice can take the form of a structured research plan, but it can also come in the form of the questions we ask in everyday life. Why doesn’t that work? Isn’t there a better way to do this? What would happen if we did this differently?

Questions might come from the boardroom, the waiting room, the clinic, or the community. Probably all of them.

Questions are also what we use to guide our strategy making, vision setting, and evaluation. For starters, I like to recommend asking: “how might we” as a way to encourage new thinking about our existing situation.

Vision

Vision setting is the process of defining a compelling, aspirational picture of what an organization aims to become or achieve in the future. It answers the question: “What do we want to be?” and provides direction and inspiration for long-term strategy and decision-making.

A compelling vision is aspirational and inspiring. It provides clear direction (while involving others to generate empowerment, inclusivity, impact), guides strategic decisions (such as which services to offer, which ones to modify, or what to ignore), and is broad enough to allow flexibility but specific enough to be meaningful.

Key characteristics of effective vision:

Future-oriented – where you’re going, not where you are
Inspirational – motivates and engages people
Clear – easy to understand and remember
Ambitious – stretches the organization beyond its current state

Visioning can be done structurally, but also in a manner that reflects what people dream about. To illustrate, let’s look at staff. Consider asking them: why did you come (to this organization)? What motivated you to get into the work you do? Think of a time when you felt engaged at work. What was that like? What would make you proud to be a part of this organization? When we ask these questions of others and ourselves, we are stating what we think a vision is.

There is a structured process or steps you can take to envision and make visible your vision (see here for tips), but just paying attention to what activates and excites people is a good start.

Planning

Planning is the part of strategy that most people know. Strategic planning is a structured process, but unlike strategic design, it’s not developed for use. The separation between the plan and its implementation is one of the reasons there are so many practical limitations on strategic plans.

A further reason is that planning often makes the assumption of stability and consistency in the environment. If you are working in health or human services, you know that the context is remarkably dynamic. In these conditions, complexity-oriented approaches are needed to make plans that are actionable, adaptive, and effective. This is a different style of planning — more about preparation, resilience, and adaptability — than a traditional model.

This also means rethinking what the outputs and metrics are — which we’ll cover below.

Implementation

Even the most well-crafted strategy faces significant hurdles when it meets organizational reality, particularly in uncertain or unstable environments. Plans that looked clear on paper quickly collide with shifting market conditions, environmental upheaval, unexpected competition for resources (or customers), or sudden regulatory changes that render key assumptions obsolete.

Internally, organizations struggle with competing priorities, resource constraints, and the inertia that comes from established ways of working—employees may resist change, middle managers may interpret directives differently, and cross-functional coordination often breaks down under pressure.

Furthermore, when the gap between leadership and frontline teams can be large, and within these gaps clarity tends to be diluted at each level. Remember the telephone game we played in school? This is partly what happens when strategy isn’t communicated well and when people are left out of the planning process. Enhanced communication and implementation is but one of the many benefits of developing shared, co-designed strategic plans.

Perhaps most challenging is the tension between maintaining strategic focus and remaining agile enough to adapt: sticking rigidly to the plan can lead to irrelevance, but pivoting too frequently can create confusion and erode confidence. In unstable contexts, leaders must balance the need for directional consistency with the imperative to respond to new information, while keeping their teams aligned and motivated amid ambiguity.

It’s not straightforward, but ensuring there is a conversation between what you’re doing and what you’re seeing is a way to navigate that. And to make it work, you need evaluation.

Evaluation

Evaluation is the means of connecting your aspirations, actions and outcomes. What are you looking to achieve, and how will you know you’ve achieved it? Evaluation is your answer. It’s also more than that: it’s about providing the means to document your progress toward your vision and learning as you go. That’s what distinguishes strategic design from strategic planning: evaluation is built into it.

Evaluation can follow many approaches. I’m an advocate for using developmental, design-driven, and principles-focused approaches to evaluation in all matters of strategic design, which can be learned about through the links. What all of these approaches do is use data dynamically, requiring ongoing feedback loops to work, yet avoiding the hazards of only evaluating at the end. By that time, it’s too late to make changes. With developmental, design-driven approaches, feedback is integrated, by design.

Strategy Making

We’ll explore what it means to create strategy and take these ideas further in future posts.

In the meantime, consider what vision you have, what kind of people you want involved in shaping that vision, and ask what kind of ways you can create something new, better, and more effective with a different approach that just through planning. Together, we’ll show what can be done and why this way of working is far more effective than the established way of doing strategy.

Thanks for reading.

If this practical issue is yours and you want help building a strategy. Reach out and let’s talk; this is what I do. Or click here to learn more.

Image Credits: Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash, Brice Cooper on Unsplash, Windows on Unsplash