Skills of a Strategist
From Roger L. Martins piece to becoming a better Strategist.
The Three Mindsets
Starting with Customers
Use every opportunity to talk to customers — both end-customers and channel (if your business sells through a channel). You don’t have to be at all formal or scientific about it. Make it easy to get started by doing it in a comfortable situation. If you have stores, wander a few of them talking to customers. If you are B2B, tag along with salespeople. Don’t have an agenda. Just soak in the customer thoughts, reactions, and behaviors.
When you get around to doing Trying to define Strategy, keep those customer interactions front of mind. Ask yourself: Would customers be happy that I am considering this or that decision? Or would they wonder why I am wasting my time on something that will never matter to them? Keeping customers in mind will ground your strategy work in the most effective way.
Operating and Choosing in a Complex Adaptive System
Stop beating yourself up for being unable to predict the future with as much accuracy as you think you should be able to achieve. We have been educated to believe if we just crunch the data, we will be able to make a data-based decision about the future, and because it is data-based, it will be accurate. Complex adaptive systems don’t work that way!
Instead, see everything we do as tweaking, watching the results, tweaking, watching, tweaking, etc. That will help us internalize that our choices neither must nor can be perfect.
Inventing the Future
To get more comfortable with inventing the future, we practice the craft of reverse-engineering the status quo by asking the most important question in strategy: What Would Have to be True (WWHTBT)?
Ask WWHTBT with respect to future possibilities and in doing so unearth the risks that we must counter in order to choose a new possibility.
However, if you also ask WWHTBT going forward for the status quo choice to be sound, you will learn that continuing the status quo is often as risky (or even more so) as shifting to a different strategy possibility.
Hence, if you make a practice of reverse-engineering the status quo, you will provide yourself the encouragement to invent the future, even if that entails needing to make something true in the future that is not currently true. But that is the highest leverage job of the strategist — to make true something that is currently not true.
The Three Skills
Qualitative Appreciation Skills
Practice being a data omnivore, seeking out and consuming all forms of data. This includes data that is qualitative in nature. It includes data from other domains than the one in which you are making decisions. And it includes quantitative data that is not statistically significant — including single occurrences.
In each case, consider the data in question and practice drawing inferences from it. Keep practicing until you become a data omnivore and in strategy, you will outperform your carnivorous colleagues, eating only quantative data.
Dialogue Skills
Strategy is a team sport in which better strategic decisions arrive out of productive interpretations of diverse data and insights. Force yourself to learn how to integrate multiple views into your strategy-making by never engaging in strategy work alone. And I mean: never. That is what will get you the dialogue practice you need.
Start with people with whom you find easiest to engage in strategy dialogue, like closer colleagues or friendly customers. Then as that becomes comfortable, move out to tougher customers and colleagues with whom you don’t see eye to eye. And as you practice, focus on how you can integrate their views into your thoughts on the strategy at hand.
While doing so, practice inquiry as frequently as you engage in advocacy. Dialogue is a two-way street, otherwise it would be called ‘monologue.’ And that means asking the questions that help you ferret out insights that aren’t currently in your head. It means encouraging your dialogue partners to share rather than make them listen incessantly to your point of view.
Skills in Juggling More Balls
Great strategy comes from considering more features of the strategy landscape as you are coming up with your choices.
On this front, it is difficult to know what you don’t know. So, practice going on category treasure hunts. As you are contemplating a strategy choice, write down all the features you are thinking about — e.g., customers, competitors, recent activity in the market, etc. Then seek out a diverse set of dialogue partners and don’t ask them for their answers to your strategy problem, but what categories they would make certain to consider if they were working on it. There is a very good chance you will get one or two good ideas for more balls to juggle while you consider your choice.
If you practice this repeatedly, you will get insights as to the additional categories you should keep more closely in mind every time you consider a strategy choice.