How good is your life strategy?

Ashley Mwanza

In the past week I had discussions with friends who are at a ‘crossroads’ in their lives. But after listening to them I realised one commonality. Strategy was lacking, or if it was there it was just not good enough. To be specific, they all have fuzzy strategic objectives. One form this problem can take is a scrambled mess of things to accomplish, a dog’s dinner of goals. A long list of things to do or accomplish, often mislabelled as strategies or objectives, is not a strategy. It is just a list of things to do. A strategy is a way through a difficulty, an approach to overcoming an obstacle, a response to a challenge. Life is a challenge, devise a strategy.

‘To do’ lists usually grow out of ‘planning’ for one’s future, in which one comes up with things they would like to accomplish. Rather than focus on a few important items, one sweeps the goals into the ‘strategic plan’. Then, in recognition that it is a dog’s dinner, the label “long term” is added, implying that none of these things can be accomplished soon. Yet despite it all, they plough ahead trying to achieve the all the goals at once, mission impossible. A vivid example is the strategy of the mayor of a small city in the Pacific Northwest in the USA. His planning committee’s strategic plan contained 47 strategies and 178 action items. Action item number 122 was “create a strategic plan.”

This leads into the second type of a weak strategic objective, the “blue sky”, typically a simple restatement of the desired state of affairs or of the challenge. It skips over the annoying fact that one has no clue as to how to get to achieve their goals. One may choose to successfully identify the key challenge and propose an overall approach to dealing with the challenge. But if the consequent strategic objectives are just as difficult to meet as the original challenge, the strategy has added little value.

Good strategy, in contrast, works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favourable outcomes. It also builds a bridge between the critical challenge at the heart of the strategy and action, between desire and immediate objectives that lie within grasp. Thus, the objectives that a good strategy sets stand a good chance of being accomplished, given existing resources and competencies. 

Strategy involves focus and, therefore, choice. And choice means setting aside some goals in favour of others. When this hard work is not done, weak strategy is the result.

By now, I hope you are fully awake to the dramatic differences between good and bad strategy. To close off here are tips in crafting good strategies, which have a basic underlying structure:

1. A diagnosis: an explanation of the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as being the critical ones.

2. A guiding policy: an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.

3. Coherent actions: steps that are coordinated with one another to support the accomplishment of the guiding policy.

To accomplish anything in life you have to be a strategist, and the core of the strategist’s life is always the same: discover the crucial factors in a situation and design a way to coordinate and focus actions to deal with them.

Some parts of this article are borrowed material from McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011, from an article by Richard Rumelt’s ‘The perils of bad strategy’ (the article is adapted from his forthcoming book, ‘Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters’, Crown Publishing, July 2011).