Strategic thinking in the time of Coronavirus

A strategist’s regimen for staying fit in uncertain times.

I wrote the following piece at the turn of the new year before WHO officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. And for all the expected reasons, I’ve held off on sharing it. So many of our heads and hearts are elsewhere, and the timing just didn’t feel right.

But as I’ve watched my clients, my team, and my community grapple with COVID-19 these past couple weeks, I’m increasingly convinced that great strategic thinking is precisely what our leaders—in all types of organizations—need to practice in this moment. Strategic thinking that is creative while still effective at scale. Bold, yet pragmatic. Generous, but with clear intention and impact. Deeply rigorous, yet agile enough to be applied quickly and in different contexts. And most of all, strategic thinking that is human. That grapples with inequity and privilege. That’s not always perfectly logical and clear cut. That recognizes and embraces the human condition and is designed for us and all of our idiosyncrasies.

It’s this kind of strategic thinking that can be a potent grounding force when we’re feeling out of our element. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit recounts one definition for being lost:

"…to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery."

I believe great strategic thinking is one way to become “fully present.” And as a result, it can turn what's normally a feeling of helplessness into a source of resilience, and ultimately, strength and progress.

With that preface, here’s my take on what goes into great strategic thinking— unedited from when I first sat down to write it. I was fortunate to have so many people, in so many different moments and manners, teach and gift me these principles. I hope you will find them as invaluable as I have. Right now, working from home, with my two little boys and my wife beside me, I see my present fully — in the face of all the uncertainty and mystery of the days and weeks to come. And I am grateful. I am hopeful. And I know that we will find a way forward together.

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How I stay fit: A strategist’s regimen

Strategic thinking is a lot like a sport. And like a pro athlete, being a great strategist requires a high degree of fitness, a deep understanding of the game being played, as well as imagination and creativity to use both of those things to either achieve the goals of the game or purposefully transform it. Getting to that level takes practice and commitment. It means really getting to know your teammates, opponents, coaches, trainers, owners, fans, journalists, etc.— and the role they each play. And it calls for a well-rounded regimen, with shifting points of focus within it as your ability grows and the game evolves.

After a decade of collaborating with executives at Fortune 500 companies, here are the principles that make up the regimen I practice and preach to my team of strategists at SYPartners.

1. Ask the right questions. It’s easy to jump to conclusions, focusing energy to address a symptom rather than holding time and space to understand the underlying issue. That’s because symptoms can be seductive — they are usually most visible, tangible, and felt. Great strategists overcome this pressure and urgency to produce a solution. Instead, they take time to form the right set of questions to uncover and understand root causes. And once asked and answered, they look not only at the findings, but also for the relationships between them and the patterns they form.
2. Tell the story. Stories help people make sense of the world. They are patterns of information that all human beings use to find meaning and understanding. Strategy, at its most potent, brings clarity and direction when the path forward is unclear. By telling the story of the strategy, you effectively cast people as protagonists in a scene giving sharp relief to what needs to happen, why, and how they fit in. After all, strategies themselves don’t change the world. People do.
3. Design for people. Strategies are most needed when an organization needs to change what it’s doing. Naturally, it also means that the organization’s people will have to change some of their behaviors. The most successful strategies address both parts of the equation, not just the first. Practicing empathy for the people who will put the strategy into action is vital. Understanding their lived experience, as much as their strengths and gaps, ensures that you are truly addressing what’s required to motivate and support the new behaviors that underpin the broader strategy. Done well, it enables an organization to work in harmony to achieve an audacious vision rather than fight itself.
4. Hold multiple frames. It can be incredibly challenging to keep an open mind and stay flexible as you try to identify and land a strategy. Admittedly, once you have an idea, it’s hard not to fixate on it, evaluating everything else you hear as its foil. This closes you off to other possibilities, and you end up going with your idea or the first idea, instead of the best idea. Instead try creating space for different ideas. In a literal sense, that might mean sketching or writing down each idea and approach on distinct pages before comparing them. Mentally, it might mean acknowledging the different assumptions or conditions for each possible solution, rather than adhering to a static premise. However you do it, holding multiple frames makes it possible to explore and evaluate a multitude of approaches, each with its own merits.
5. Challenge your convictions. Everyone uses shortcuts to work more efficiently and effectively. Our ability to identify patterns and use them to recall what has and hasn’t worked in the past is a critical aspect of being a great strategist. At the same time, falling back onto these “defaults” can lead even the best strategist down the same line of thinking again and again. The ability to ask yourself and others what biases and assumptions you might be bringing to the work, testing them, and even changing them, can lead to novel ideas and brings greater rigor to your thinking.
6. Seek out diverse perspectives. Inviting difference into the work might seem counter-productive, especially in complex projects. But by engaging with different perspectives (whether through reading, listening, or collaboration), you can enhance the efficacy of your work. Beyond providing inspiration, diversity of perspective can also uncover blindspots and dramatically expand your empathy for your stakeholders — either as implementers or beneficiaries of your strategy — and in turn, give you greater insight into shaping your approach to the challenges at hand.
7. Make your thinking tangible. Strategies are rarely tested before they’re implemented. They are well-conceived — with data and insights — but once formed there’s often no room to validate whether the theory of it all holds water. Building time into the process of forming strategy to test your thinking is vital, even if only by rendering it as a visual or physical outcome that you can “user-test” with a stakeholder. There’s nothing worse than working on a strategy for months in isolation, only to roll it out and have it rejected by those whom you’re trying to engage, activate, or impact.
8. Embrace constraints. You will almost never have exactly what you think you need to do your job well. The lack of time, resources, access, information, etc. can often feel debilitating, but it’s a fundamental part of the strategic process. A great way to turn constraints into a powerful creative and liberating force is to practice “Yes, and.” An exercise practiced by improv performers, “yes, and” in strategy-making is to simply embrace a limitation so that you can focus your energy on working with what you have (rather than fighting over what you lack). To find the “yes, and” is to find abundance in scarcity, applying imagination and creativity to factors normally taken for granted or overlooked, turning them into the keys of your strategy.
9. Design the problem. Strategy begins and ends with the problem statement. In fact, defining the problem is one of the most creative acts you can do as a strategist. And yet, so often the strategic process leapfrogs a closer examination of whether the problem has been properly defined. Ingenious solutions to seemingly intractable challenges usually arise when someone models the problem differently than anyone before them. Remember the first eight practices. Take time to explore the full picture. Interrogate the explicit and tacit assumptions that have been made, the perspectives that have been overlooked, and how human beings have been factored in (or not).

In the end, being a great strategist is to relish the opportunity to envision the challenge at hand in an entirely new way. It is to joyfully sit in the ambiguity—learning, iterating, and playing—before charging ahead. Because once you’ve defined the problem, there’s only a finite number of ways to solve it… that is, until you turn the problem statement upside down again.