Bad strategy is like trying to fix your car's engine with a hammer

Welcome to the "The Catalyst," Kevin Noble's weekly newsletter about becoming a more effective leader.

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Hello, everyone!

If you’ll be in Austin, Texas on May 18th you are hereby invited to a small leadership rucking event!

The goal is to get out in nature, do something physical, and connect with each other.

We’ll go for a three mile walk on residential streets. I’ll be wearing my 30 pound plate. You can wear any weight you’re comfortable with; you just have to have something on your back.

​The sign up link is here. It’ll be a good time. I hope to see you there!

If you're not in Austin that day, but do want to participate - please head out on your own that morning. Send me a picture!

Kevin

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A Quote

“ You possess a kind of inner force that seeks to guide you toward your Life’s Task—what you are meant to accomplish in the time that you have to live. In childhood this force was clear to you. It directed you toward activities and subjects that fit your natural inclinations, that sparked a curiosity that was deep and primal. In the intervening years, the force tends to fade in and out as you listen more to parents and peers, to the daily anxieties that wear away at you. This can be the source of your unhappiness—your lack of connection to who you are and what makes you unique. The first move toward mastery is always inward—learning who you really are and reconnecting with that innate force. Knowing it with clarity, you will find your way to the proper career path and everything else will fall into place. It is never too late to start this process. — Robert Green in "Mastery"

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Three Things

1 - 🕷️ Walking Hexapod - When I studied mechanical engineering, this is what I wanted to do with my life; build cool mechanical stuff. These gentlemen modified six backyard bucket loaders into a single six-legged motorized device. Very impressive engineering project!

2 - 🐀 Bosavi Wooly Rat - Can you imagine a three pound rat? This rat species was discovered in 2009 in a volcanic crater in Papua New Guinea. The crater is 2.5 miles wide and has walls half a mile high, so the animals there have developed largely in isolation. I learned about this in the book, “The Lost Species.” In that book I also learned that we have only named roughly 20% of all species on Earth. So few!

3 - 📙 “Million Dollar Weekend” - I really like this entrepreneurial book’s emphasis on testing ideas and getting started. The subtitle is, “The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours.” It’s about testing a LOT of ideas by getting into action. It’s not about thinking forever or creating the best website. It’s about getting through your own barriers, finding customers, and getting started.

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Deeper Dive on a Practical Guide to Strategy

When you ask people what strategy is, you get a ton of different definitions.

• It’s the “what,” not the “how.”
• It’s the “why.”
• It’s creating value.
• It’s a plan.
• It’s decision making at the corporate level.

It doesn’t help that leaders can also use it as a cudgel. They’ll look at something and say, that’s not strategy, that’s tactics.

The result of all of this is confusion. I see many leaders get stuck when they’re asked to produce a “strategy”.

After reading a lot of books on strategy, listening to lots of interviews, reading articles, and of course, “doing” strategy in my work, I’d like to share with you my practical guide to strategy.

It’s a general framework, presented in a logical sequence, that you can use in the course of your own work.

I should mention that like most subjects, strategy is nuanced and deep. As you get comfortable with this framework you can continue to push yourself deeper into theory and practice. I’ll layer on complexity over time in this newsletter, but for now, this framework should get you 80% of the way there whenever you need a strategy at work.

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What is strategy?

I think of strategy as the following:

Solving problems within a domain across a time horizon.

The output looks like a set of actions you’re going to take to solve the problem. And then you get to work!

In the definition of strategy note that the problem solving element is always present, it’s the domain and the time horizon that change.

That means you can think of strategy as occurring on a spectrum of varying domain size and time duration.

On the upper end, you’ve got your classic business strategy. The domain is an entire complex business, like Amazon. The time horizon might be three years. Strategy for the Amazon CEO is how to hit their goals across their current (and potential future!) business over that time period.

On the lower end of the spectrum, you might have a strategy for making breakfast. The domain is the current food and equipment in the location of your kitchen. The time horizon is 30 minutes. You’ve got to figure out how to solve getting yourself fed in that time period.

You’re being strategic all the time! You’re making decisions. You’re solving problems. You’re choosing not to do some things so that you can choose to do others. You’re pursuing your goals with action.

When you think of strategy occurring in layers, you start to see how all those strategies need to nest and contribute to each other. The Amazon corporate strategy needs to nest with the business unit strategy, which connects to the warehouse strategy, which connects to a hiring strategy, and so on.

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Are goals strategy?

Absolutely not. Goals are not, by themselves, strategy.

It’s very common for a purported strategy to contain only a list of goals. Goals are a wish for something you’d like to be true. They’re an important element - you need to know where you’re going to frame the problems you need to solve - but goals by themselves are not strategy.

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Is strategy a one-time event?

Again, no. Strategy is not a one-time event.

Problems are not static. The world and the people in it are constantly changing. This doesn’t mean you need to craft a new strategy all the time, but it does mean that you need to pay attention to the world around you to see if you do need to change your strategy.

Did your goals change? Was there a shift in an underlying assumption? Did you learn something new? All of these are triggers to ask yourself what impact that has on your strategy.

You have to understand the situation you’re in in order to have an effective strategy. Since your situation is not a one-time event, strategy is not either.

Okay, at this point you’re probably thinking that you’ve read this far and all you’ve got is a definition and some idea what strategy is not - that’s not practical!

Fair 😀

Let’s dive into the main course now!

What are the five elements of practical strategy?

There are five elements to practical strategy. I’ll list them here and then elaborate on them next.

1 - Map the System
2 - Diagnose the Problem
3 - Identify Possible Actions
4 - Select and Sequence
5 - Execute

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Map the System

You can’t solve a problem if you don’t understand the system it’s operating within. Systems are powerful.

If your car is broken you wouldn’t walk up with a hammer and just start banging on things! I mean, you could, but that’s unlikely to make the car run better.

The same principle applies at work. You have to map out the system.

What are the elements? Who are the people? Where does information and work flow? Where are your users and customers?

Where could things get stuck? What are the incentives?

You’re trying to see how all the elements of the system fit together. The people, processes, and tools.

My favorite technique to do this is to map it. Literally draw it on a whiteboard. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate value stream map, service map, or customer journey - although those can help when it’s worth the investment. The map can be just a sketch on a whiteboard.

You can always come back to this later. You can refine your map later if you learn new information or need to get finer-grained detail.

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Diagnose the Problem

Once you’ve got a map of your system, you need to figure out what’s wrong.

Which pieces of the system are not working at optimal levels? Are the outcomes of the system what you need?

Diagnose from multiple angles and levels. How well do the tools work? How is execution in the system? Do you have the right people with the right skills? What do the current metrics tell you? Are you missing metrics?

What are the various symptoms you observe? Write these out. Have two sections; one for what’s not working well, and another for what is working well.

All of the above is divergent thinking. You’re thinking creatively about all the things that are working and not working. The next step is for convergent thinking. You’ll have to apply some ‘art’ and intuition here to figure out which elements of this diagnosis matter.

A good first pass is to take your list of systems and observations and apply a high/medium/low impact analysis. You can assume all your listed items are true, but do they matter? If you fixed it, how much would it help?

This convergent prioritization is a necessary step because you can’t solve everything, especially with time constraints. You’ll need to prioritize what you want to take forward into the next step.

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Identify Possible Actions

This step is the most creative! For all of the items you think are worth solving, start identifying possible solutions. What could you do to address the elements of your diagnosis?

There are a few things to keep in mind here:

Come up with many solutions - Be careful not to fall in love with your first idea! Force yourself and team to come up with multiple options, especially for more complex problems. Remember, innovation comes from ideas having sex, so you’ll want to get the right people with the right perspectives sharing ideas creatively.

Changes in one area impact others - Most systems aren’t static, so changes in one area will have an impact on others. This is important to consider so you don’t have negative secondary effects. You don’t want to solve one of your problems and make another area of the system act worse. Think end to end.

Think beyond iterative change - A risk in thinking through problems one at a time is that you’ll only come up with iterative solutions. Zoom out. Group items together. Can you change the system in such a way that multiple issues go away?

In all of this you’re not yet committing to action. That comes later. For now you’re just being creative and getting ideas on paper.

You’re ending this step with a variety of solutions you could bring forth; the next step is deciding what to do.

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Select and Sequence

This is one of the harder parts of strategy; what are you going to do, in which order, and why?

There are a few dimensions you can think through in order to help with your selection process:

Build Momentum - Is there something you can solve first that you have high confidence will work? What can you do to give the whole team confidence? Build momentum and start the flywheel rolling!

Test Risk - What could go wrong in your plan? How could you increase your chances of success by learning earlier in the sequence? Look for areas of high uncertainty and see if they can be pulled toward the front of the sequence.

High ROI - Where do you have high leverage to create big outcomes at low cost? It can be a good idea to front load these in the sequence.

Make Future Work Easier - Are there systems you can create in the beginning that make execution faster in the future? Is there an architecture that needs to be developed before you start building something? Be careful with this one; sometimes you front-load architecture, but then the situation changes and renders the architecture obsolete. The reverse failure can happen, too! A team can ignore architecture and slog through execution, taking on tech debt and making future work harder.

What you’re doing in this section is creating a sequence for your commitments. We do this, so that we can do this, so that we can do this.

Think of these sequenced commitments as a portfolio of bets. There’s always execution and impact risk. Nothing is a sure thing. Think of your output in this section like this:

I bet
if we do these things,
in this order,
we’ll hit our goal,
in this time frame.

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Execute

Everything up to the prior step isn’t impacting your business. It’s just a paper exercise!

You have to get things done. You have to deliver on your commitments.

If, for example, you find yourself on a multi-month strategic journey, and you’re not executing anything, that’s a sign you’re off track. This happens a lot when leaders are looking for certainty in an uncertain environment. They think another data pull or another week of thinking will unlock something. Sometimes those help, but more often it’s the fear of committing to a certain course of action.

Strategies have risk, but so does doing nothing.

Especially in complex environments where outcomes can’t be predicted, often the only way to solve the problem is through execution. You have to get started, learn, and adjust.

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Bringing it all Together

Strategy is solving problems, within a domain, across a time horizon. You’re creating a portfolio of bets; a sequence of actions you believe will solve your problem. Then you execute on that sequence and adjust.

Strategy is NOT a set of goals. Strategy is NOT a one-time event.

A practical guide to strategy consists of the following elements:

1 - Map the System: Understand all the elements of the system you’re trying to influence.

2 - Diagnose the Problem: Figure out what’s not working in your system.

3 - Identify Possible Actions: Create possible solutions to address the elements of your diagnosis.

4 - Select and Sequence: Select what you are going to do, in which order, and why. This is your portfolio of bets.

5 - Execute: Get shit done!

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Call to Action

Do you have any thorny problems bothering you at work? Are you in the middle of solving a gnarly problem?

Review your work against the practical elements. Is there anything you need to revisit? Are you coming up with actions without a diagnosis? Do you understand how your system works? Is there a re-sorting of your sequence that could help?

Go back and shore up any part of the process that’s not quite hitting the mark for you.

Don’t forget to have fun with this! This work is a cool blend of science and art. These are hard problems often performed in a hard environment, but let your creativity and joy come through. 🥳

I’m super interested in hard problems! I’d really love to hear what you’re working on and what you think about these steps. Email me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz. I’d love to hear from you!

Kevin