A Strategy is Not a Plan — It’s a Future-Tense Growth Story
This open research note was originally published in late 2013 on Storify, a once beloved tool to create narratives from disconnected social media posts at face-to-face events. It is the first in a series of stories saved in The Social Spring project.
Strategy scholar Sir Lawrence Freedman shared lessons from ancient Greece and Sun Tzu to GM and Iraq with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs at the Chicago Club Friday night. But the Chicago Council and learned Sir Lawrence buried the brilliant lead — a strategy is not a plan, it’s a long-term growth story.
One of Britain’s top military strategy historians and a member of the official inquiry into the 2003 Iraq War, Sir Lawrence discussed strategy lessons we can draw from military, political and business history from ancient Greece and Sun Tzu to GM and Iraq.
You know you’re a strategy geek when…
Friday night after work, after a long week, is a tough time to hear a nuanced lecture on a weighty topic. But the room was packed at the Chicago Club “for a centuries-spanning discussion explaining how the world’s greatest minds navigate toward success.” So what can we learn from the world’s greatest minds that we can take back to work next week?
Everyone has a plan ’til they get punched in the mouth
The recent Economist analysis of Sir Lawrence’s grand tome offered the best teaser of — and framework for applying — what we might learn on Friday night.
The Economist led with the idea that “a strategy is not a plan” and clearly explained why. Strategies often fail because they don’t factor in the agility to adapt to changing conditions. “No plan survives contact with the enemy,” as 19th century German field-marshall Helmuth von Moltke explained the need for agile strategy over plans for predetermined steps. Strategy scholar Mike Tyson got more to the point when said “Everyone has a plan ’til they get punched in the mouth.” If strategy isn’t a plan, what is it?
It’s a script that incorporates the possibility of chance events and attempts to anticipate the interactions of many players over a long time with no grand finale. Strategists are more like soap opera writers: “The climax that concludes a normal drama is denied the strategist, who is more like the writer of a long-running soap opera, with its myriad twists and turns.”
A strategy is a long script. A strategist is more like an episodic TV writer or editor. Content is king.
Quick survey of strategy history
The early application of strategy to business was largely focused on General Motors, according to Sir Lawrence. As GM didn’t face much competition at the time, strategy didn’t. I would have loved to ask a follow-up question about the development of business strategy from this point to Michael Porter and beyond, but used my question opportunity to dig deeper on a more important point (see my headline and below).
Agree wholeheartedly that the “leadership lessons of…” genre is largely a business book backwater. Although I am still curious to read Cigars, Whiskey and Winning: Leadership Lessons from General Ulysses S. Grant, which I gave to a former boss once for Christmas. Some of us non-historians need to have these lessons made more accessible — at least to get us started on a topic.
Expediency is the soul of strategy? Clausewitz sounds worth going deeper on — at least in Sir Lawrence’s primer.
Here’s the Boston Consulting group guide to Clausewitz, if I ever have the time and inspiration to read it.
Again, I agree with Sir Lawrence on the “guru wave” of Tom Peters, etc. — that they have some good ideas, but they’re often pushed too hard. They really do seem to lack perspective and rely too heavily on link-baity sound bites.
After all, good strategy is agile and makes the best of the current situation. And pushy strategy leaves little room for that.
Strategy is a story about the future
Strategy rarely goes as planned and constantly needs to be reevaluated. That much is fairly clear from this brief review of history or having tried to set and execute one. Running out of time, Sir Lawrence made a brief point on strategy as narrative as he wrapped up that missed what seemed to be the big idea. Luckily I got a question in upfront and asked him what he meant in the context of the Economist’s reading that “a strategy is not a plan” — in fact it’s a long script.
Indeed, a quick Google search shows the concluding chapter “explores the value of considering strategy as a story about power told in the future tense from the perspective of a leading character.”
Strategy — and its development — is all about story. It’s a future-tense growth story of the future. But others have their own stories. So you have to use other people’s scripts in your strategy development if you expect to be successful. This comes out of cognitive psychology.
This point about using other people’s scripts also aligns with my two big early strategy teachers — Al Ries and Jack Trout — and their work on Positioning: The Battle for the Mind, which I was lucky enough to read when I was still in high school on the advice of early marketing mentors. Developing strategy from an audience point of view has been intuitive ever since. It should be noted that this is best practice in content strategy as well — using personas to view strategy and content development from the audience perspective.
Spying on friends
Ambassador Daalder’s question about spying on friends such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel seemed to take Sir Lawrence a bit more by surprise and resulted in a more roundabout response. The net result of which was that we’re in an entirely different age now — the post-9/11 information age. If strategy is story of the future and this recent event is a clue, what does the 2014 global growth story look like? Or the 2024? Assuming US policy continues to include policing of the increasingly risky and interconnected world, the narrative will likely continue to include spying on friends.
Now trending: Chicago & Amazon sold out of Strategy
Even though I raced to the book table at the end of the Q&A, so did every other strategy geek in the room. I secured a pretty good spot mid-line, but they sold the last copy just before me. And this supply represented the scouring of bookstores across the city, according to a Chicago Council staffer. Amazon is also sold out, just over a month since the release date. I probably won’t have time to read it until Christmas vacation anyway.
Takeaways
Here’s what I think can be safely taken from Sir Lawrence’s talk on Friday night — as well as the Economist’s excellent analysis of Strategy: A History — and applied to work tomorrow morning:
• Plans are important but not a strategy — know the difference or risk more failure. You will inevitably get “punched in the mouth” sooner or later by metaphorical Mike Tysons. If your organization sets strategy backwards by starting with objectives and working backwards, it probably won’t work. Lead with agile strategy and manage with ever-changing tactical plans. Learn the difference or risk more failures than you need to.
• Strategy is a future-tense, long-term growth story — write yours. Strategy is just a set of ever-changing expediencies woven into a coherent narrative in the future tense. If your story isn’t written down in a way that everyone can understand you probably don’t have a strategy.
• Execute corporate strategy with a content strategy — or take on yet more risk. As a strategy is a long-term growth story, you’ll need to develop and manage content across all media that communicates that strategy to be successful. Otherwise the content of all your communications risk being isolated tactics that may actually be driving interactions that work against your strategy.
A content strategy is simply an agile long-term plan for branded content that helps to increase client interaction and grow relationships. It plans the ongoing execution of the overall corporate strategy on an editorial calendar for all the key media and topics from a client perspective over their ideal long-term relationship. Content strategy often requires major culture change to develop an agile newsroom-mentality, but it’s worth it given the risky alternative in increasingly competitive markets. Content strategy is generally synonymous with content marketing strategy — it’s content-focused marketing strategy vs. the old promotional product-focused marketing model that is simply not competitive for most brands these days. Financial firms and publicly-traded companies will of course need to carefully manage reputation and compliance risk when communicating their future-tense, long-term growth story to manage that popular misperception that a strategy is a plan with predictable outcomes.
[Note: This content strategy point is entirely mine, and as a content strategist I’m obviously biased. So make of this what you will. In my content strategy definition, I’m tempted to change the word “plan” to “script” based on Sir Lawrence’s talk, but will leave it in for now as it still seems accurate in this context. Also, the last half of this definition will change depending on what your objectives are, but this defines it fairly well for most business brands at least.]
If you missed Sir Lawrence’s Chicago Council talk, they will likely post the audio here at some point soon. In the meantime, here’s another recent talk he gave at Google. I wonder if they got the significance of the point about growth-oriented narrative and how it might apply to their ever-expanding content strategy.
