What does strategy really mean?

In the workplace, if feedback means ‘negative’, strategy means ‘status’. Strategy is the ultimate career capability – the domain of executives charged with carving the course. Strategy is the ability to rise above, work ‘on’ the business, and see the wood for the trees. 

So, why is it so hard to explain what it is? How do you do strategy? Is it different from planning? The same as a Mission? If you find yourself confused when the word is flung around meeting rooms and email chains, rest easy. Strategy is almost as hard to define as it is to do. 

The strategically placed elephant 

We all know strategy is critical to success, so we liberally dust corporate lingo with it. We say it because it sounds important. Presenting a board update? Make sure it’s strategic. Delivering your elevator pitch? Slip in a sneaky strategy to sound more impressive. Challenging a decision? Say it wasn’t strategic.

We recently received feedback that Powrsuit isn’t afraid to address the taboos. So here’s another one: the elephant in the room usually isn’t strategically placed; it’s just hanging there munching on some bananas. 

Strategy is part of a complex puzzle

Strategy is part of an interrelated set of activities that define why an organisation exists, what success looks like, the unique value it offers and how it delivers it. It probably comes as no surprise that many of the labels are used interchangeably. So, here’s a quick overview:

Most of the time, we’re just planning

The most common confusion arises around the difference between planning and strategy, which might explain why the strategy part is often missed completely. The best distinction we’ve read is from Roger Martin:

“Strategy is the act of making an integrated set of choices, which positions the organisation to win, while planning is the act of laying out projects with timelines, deliverables, budgets, and responsibilities.”

What does this mean? Strategy is risky. It requires boldly sitting in uncertainty in the pursuit of achieving your Mission. Strategy involves deciding what to do and (more importantly), what not to do. When your Mission is a two-sentence overview of how you’ll get from here to a future utopia Vision, your strategy acts as the clarifying guardrails. There could be multiple paths, but this is the one you think is most likely to succeed. 

For example, Powrsuit’s product strategy is to deliver, at scale, an innovative and impactful professional development solution for an underserved group (women on the way up). Creating loyal and vocal advocates by delivering a disproportionate return on investment.

We could have decided on any of these other strategies:

• A recruitment platform that removes bias from the end-to-end process
• A mentoring solution that connects senior leaders with less-experienced women on the way up
• A career coaching marketplace

Why didn’t we? Our evidence-backed belief is that the strategy we chose has the highest chance of achieving our Mission. These guardrails enable us to plan effectively.

Planning without strategy is like pasta without starch 

How many times have you worked on a project and not understood why you’re doing it? That disconnect is either because there wasn’t a strategy or the strategy wasn’t conveyed to you.

Without the guardrails provided by a strategy, plans are usually reactive – a response to what competitors are doing, one piece of feedback, a ‘great idea’ from an executive, or the most ‘urgent’ email in an inbox.Put simply, even if you don’t have a strategy, you do have a strategy – it’s to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. You could deliver perfectly on your reactive plans and still not achieve anything of value.

Strategy sits at every level

We’ve led teams of incredibly bright and ambitious people and have regularly heard the request to ‘work on strategy’. Ironically, it’s usually in response to an (overlooked) opportunity to do just that. 

Our misguided correlation between strategy and status doesn’t serve us. Strategy is messy, complex and kind of boring. It’s the relentlessly hard work of deciding the best thing to do to drive organisational value, challenging it, refining it and backing it – despite all the noise. 

Here’s a secret: a lot of people don’t enjoy strategy. That’s how it should be, because we all bring our own unique mix of strengths to the table, and strategy isn’t the only important one. However, there are simple ways we can all be more strategic in our day-to-day work. None of them are glamorous:

1. Address limiting habits 

Stop doing everyone else’s work, say no, and fight your fear of failure. Overwhelm drives reactivity, so form a new habit of reflection.

2. Become an effective problem-solver

At its heart, strategy is a problem-solving exercise – the problem you’re solving is the best way to get from here to there. So, build a practice of switching between problem and solution mode. Fight the urge to jump to solution mode too quickly or stay stuck too long.

3. Deliver to a strategy

Make a point of understanding what strategy you’re contributing to, and prioritise your work accordingly. You should be able to tie almost every piece of work you do back to a strategy. If you can’t, ask how it fits!