How Do You Think About Strategy?
Your definition of strategy must be differentiated, or else.
You are a leader. You navigate relentless competition. Mastering strategy ensures success. Strategic complacency brings decline first, then imminent defeat. John Boyd's definition of strategy differentiates and empowers.
Boyd defined strategy as:
"A mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts as a basis for realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforeseen world of many bewildering events and many contending interests."1
“Changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts” to realize aims in VUCA. The imperative is that you must sharpen strategy or lose.
To thrive you must pursue lifelong learning. You do this to elevate analysis and synthesis, judgment and cognitive agility. You continue to hone your intellectual and mental muscles. This empowers you to process market signals faster. You are better equipped to weigh decisions amidst the constant flux of VUCA. You can better simulate scenarios and envision outcomes. Average thinkers assume static knowledge is sufficient. They will falter in dynamic environments. You will have an advantage.
Additionally, as a leader you need to balance intense strategy with flexible execution. You re-direct resources with fluidity as conditions morph. You establish and build an adaptable culture to pivot with speed if required. All the while you retain your team's alignment on vision. As a leader, you are prepared to move your organization decisively.
Disruptions shock every industry without exception. As a forward-looking leader, you impose order by creating strategic frameworks. These guide priority-setting and resource allocation. You define a vital few initiatives, and not a trivial many. You align your teams to outflank rivals and seize opportunities during volatile times. You steer and concentrate team effort on critical goals.
It is vital for you to communicate your reasoning behind strategic shifts. Your intent must be understood across the entire team. This empowers distributed leadership to enact adaptations immediatley. Furthermore it retains cohesion of the team on broader objectives. As the leader, you influence and inspire all layers.
Remember that your competitors are likely learning and adopting these practices. They aim to outmaneuver and defeat you, casting you into irrelevance and obsolesce. If you hesitate you give them the advantage.
The message is clear. You must focus on improving analysis and synthesis, judgment and cognitive agility. You process market signals with variety, harmony, rapidity and initiative. You must build and maintain an adaptable culture to re-direct effort to your focus and direction. Strategic thinking will help guide your priorities in VUCA.
Learn, understand and teach strategy as a “mental tapestry of changing intentions.” Do this across your team at every level. Concentrate efforts to pull ahead of competitors when markets turn turbulent, as they always do. A new perspective on strategy has arrived. You must outthink your competitors or you will lose.
From John Boyd’s briefing “The Strategic Game of ? and ?”
Constant change is the one reliable constant.
Well done!