“Thwhack!”

To be Canadian is to hear the sound of a rock missile smacking your windshield, after having been spit up by rotating rubber in front of you. We Canadians are a cynical bunch; the rock chip always occurs at eye level on the driver’s side. And soon enough, all your eye focuses on is the rock chip…the 1% of the windshield. Pretty soon it’s like an itch you can’t scratch. You study that little rock chip for signs it might potentially crack in future. Is it round? Is it deep? Does it have a little line in it that might spread? It becomes all consuming. Distracted driving ensues.

Then we sit and watch that crack for months. We say we will get it fixed but life gets in the way. One cold morning several months later with the defroster on, the windshield blows that little crack right across the windshield. We finally replace the windshield only to go through the same motions again down the road.

Our problem with strategy is much like a chip in a windshield.

We know that establishing a horizon line is critical to the success of any organization. We call it a vision statement or a strategy. Our gut instinct knows strategy-making is a good thing to do. We see it (when it works well) as a driving force in companies like Apple, which has a strategy that can be summarized as: innovation and excellence in product design that makes technology easier to use. If you don’t know where you’re going, or where you’re going isn’t cool enough to attract the talent to work at it or those to invest in it, you’re simply treading water in a world of imagination that passes you by in a heartbeat.

But strategy is hard isn’t it? So hard that we’re tempted to hand it back and say it’s too hard to do. It’s herding cats and connecting dots. It’s so much easier to just dwell in your little world. Or to focus on the one problem you own without seeing connection to other things – the tree in the forest. It’s your rock chip.

Whether it’s us working in a silo, or our organizations that would culturally prefer to focus on operations (a status quo) vs strategy (a direction to pursue with the assets you have/wish to build), too often we wait to fix our narrow view of the world until it’s too late and crisis visits…when the windshield cracks.

Strategy-making is often too hard because we over-complicate it. That makes buy-in and engagement difficult. The result is all too often pie in the sky gobbledygook that says nothing differentiating, focused, ambitious, or concrete. Going through the motions creates a vicious cycle of people who don’t see the value in conducting strategic processes.

Let’s keep strategy-making to its simplest form and stop worrying about whether your process and approach sounds like a thesis. Simpler is better:

  • Understand your context by doing a simple SWOT analysis. Do not get bogged down in analysis paralysis….that melon on the top of your body intuitively sifts the world smartly all the time.
  • Understand your competition to identify potential for your own differentiation or focus.
  • Engage your organization (for communities that means internal and residents) but do not seek consensus – it’s too expensive and the trends are apparent early on.
  • Identify a single, key insight that crystallizes what your key challenge/opportunity is in pursuing a more ambitious path.
  • Fill a common gap by having a storyteller in your organization “illustrate” a community development vision – a single page visual. Include a vision statement with hard-edged words that enable measurement of progress. Use this as a feedback-request sounding board with your organization.
  • Write a defining strategy statement that overcomes your key challenge/pursues a key opportunity – enabling pursuit of your community development future.
  • Create a small set of SMART objectives that execute the strategy.
  • Create a small, annual action plan.
  • Drive strategy implementation with the buy-in you obtained from key community groups and people (Council, Chamber of Commerce, key people of trust in the community, etc.). Don’t listen to naysayers who are ever present like circling vultures.
  • Measure results and visualize representation of results annually using a colour-coded scorecard.
  • Revisit the strategy internally every year or two as a check and balance to ensure it remains relevant. Write a new, defining strategy if a new key challenge has emerged over time.

Here’s a handful of compelling resources:

Let go of the small to liberate yourself to think and act big.

Photo credit – Copyright Cliff Johnson, Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/cliff_77/209698300