I've listened to so much codswallop about strategy over the years that I felt I'd been transported to another world where "they just get it" when I went to visit a Canadian gold mining company investing in South Africa (Great Basin Gold) in the mid-2000s, and saw these two figures:

Attribution: These images are the work of Great Basin Gold (GBG). The fact that I've kept hard copies pasted to whatever wall was closest to my workspace since GBG gave them to me back in 2007 or so doesn't make this thinking any more mine than it was in 2007.


Don't fret over the detail in these two pics, which I must have spent about four hours trying to figure out how to get into a collage you can actually read - kind of. Thank goodness I finally found this kizoa tool. The detail isn't what's important in this post, and in fact that's part of today's message. Strategy isn't about detail; it's about destination and direction. (Get the alliteration?)

Destination and Direction

Of all the quotes by the legendary Zig Ziglar, and you can find many here, this one has resonated with me the most over the last few years: "If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time."

This sums up my D+D-D approach to strategy - get the Destination and Direction right, and leave the Detail to the planning stage. And before you start howling that a journey without a plan is questionable/risky/idiotic (I agree to varying degrees depending on the proposed journey), I'm not advocating not planning - au contraire! But know what you're planning for. And why. And creating consensus around the two Ds, Destination and Direction, is an exercise in itself. From my observations over the years, this is the point where nearly all strategies go pear-shaped - because creating consensus around a view of the future is hard if you're not used to thinking that way, or have been trained not to.

What constitutes a strategy?

First of all, not a word salad.

Throwing a bunch of words at a wall will not help an organisation understand how it will, in concert with its stakeholders, create value. And that's what a strategy should be about.

A strategy shouldn't be a tactical plan either, but we'll get to that in the next section.

An effective strategy, one that means something to and for an organisation, has to be the result of a real conversation among that organisation's leadership. What should that conversation be about? Can it be structured? Turns out the answer is a surprising yes. I've found this interview with a senior partner from Booz & Company, Ken Favaro, sums it up surprisingly well. I've captured most of it below for those who just want to keep reading and don't want to watch a corporate shirt...and I'd be at risk of defaming him if I commented on how engaging his style is. But what he says is important: a strategy is a set of decisions with respect to five questions:

1. What businesses should we be in?
2. How will we add value to those businesses, to their performance?
3. What [I would say "who", but that's just moi focusing on the human] is our target customer?
4. What's the value proposition for those customers?
5. What are the capabilities that we need to be distinctive at to deliver that value proposition to those customers?

So the strategy comprises a set of decisions which are made around those five questions.

I liked Mr Favaro's kicker: "The biggest problem in implementing a strategy is not having one."

Is it easy using these questions as a tool to develop strategy?

Leading discussion around those questions, and capturing consensus around "clear, coherent and specific answers" to them, takes true leadership - listening skills are far more likely to get the leadership team to agreement on what the "top of the hill" should look like than bombast or chest-beating. Yet most strategy discussions I've been involved in over the last three decades could be characterised as either HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion goes) or simply LGO (Loudest Guy's Opinion goes). And the results were predictable - nobody knew where they were going. They only had a better (or more force-fed) idea of where they had already been, and happily took off in the directions they wanted to once the "strategy" was in place.

And before you get too hung up on the words "businesses" and "customers" if the organisation you're strategy-ing for isn't a business, think about them in the broadest sense, as constructs for what you do and who you serve/bring value to. You'll get caught up in questions of business model and stakeholder engagement, or at least you should if the conversation is going deep enough.

Challenges

The biggest challenge I've experienced discussing those questions has been that people naturally focus on their capabilities (think "looking inwards" or more bluntly "navel-gazing") unless they've been trained to focus on value and, er, their clients, so getting them to not skip to question 5 is often amazingly difficult.

But if you're confident that what you're aiming for are the two Ds, Destination and Direction, you'll keep them on track, because as the first image shows...it's great to be at the base of the mountain all kitted out. So what.

The other challenge I've had with groups has been helping them to see the distinction between Question 2 and Question 4 - I see Question 2 as a "what's our business model going to be?" kind of question, where Question 4 is more of a "how well do you know your client's strategy to create value, and how your organisation could fit into it?" conversation. Both are really tricky discussions, especially if the leadership team has never allowed themselves outside the operational or tactical to experience the strategic level. And typically they end up highlighting that most people don't actually understand their company's business model (yikes) or have client focus (double yikes). Anyway, those are my interpretations of Mr Favaro's questions, and they've worked well for me in the past - I'm not wedded to them, so if you've got a better take, I'm all ears!

I've put those questions into action a few times now and can smell when an organisation hasn't really gone through the exercise of deciding on the two Ds. The biggest tell for me: when their "strategy" incorporates financial targets. Busted!

The difference between strategy and execution

Mr Favaro goes on to make a vital distinction between strategy and execution: strategy is about making decisions, and execution is about producing results. He puts some of those word cloud terms into perspective at this point, sharing that leaders have five tools which he dubs the "Corporate 5" to motivate results through execution:

• vision - what do we see for ourselves and the company in the future, and our place in that future?
• mission - what are we trying to achieve as a business?
• purpose - what gives us meaning? What defines why this company exists?
• plan - what are the actions we're going to undertake?
• goals - what are we going to set for ourselves that will define the kind of results we want to achieve?

Vision, mission and purpose are ways to rally people around a shared view of the future and help define the organisation (getting a consensus on those thorny questions, "Who are we?" and "Why are we here?"), and in doing this, motivate performance - so it's important, arguably vital, that the organisation establish these through broad consultation and stakeholder engagement. But not before taking care of the two Ds, Destination and Direction, and not instead of having the conversations on the five strategic questions which lead to decisions on the two Ds.

It's all about value

Those who've followed my winding train of thought on value since I began my Steemit journey will have picked up that I muse about how (and whether) we should measure value (I certainly believe there are better ways to do it than to normalise it to a financial value, but that this falls into the category of a future we could design for ourselves if we decide to), and what it means to different people in different spaces in our world and societies. I'm coming to believe we have a better chance of creating and sustaining value through systemic processes, and a really good shot at destroying it through siloed processes.

It can be powerful to use a framework such as the Six Capitals framework, outlined here, here, here and here, to develop a shared understanding of the value we are trying to create together with our stakeholders. And some of you may have picked up on @kevinwong's insight that there is a "roundness" to this way of thinking about value creation and sustainability - somewhat like Johan Rockström's depiction of Planetary Boundaries.

Such frameworks help us to see interrelationships between groups and systems.

Design-led thinking

Perhaps another way of looking at that hill-climb figure at the beginning of this post is that strategy is about designing for the future, not today. It takes imagination and creativity. It takes an ability to listen to people with different points of view (and maybe who speak different languages) on what conditions will be like when we get to the top, how we even define the top, and whether we all really want to be at the "top" or some other place on the mountainside, or on another mountain, for that matter.

...this will take:

Change Management

So, oddly, it might be necessary to use some tactical techniques to get the leadership team out of a zero-sum, design-based-on-where-we-are-today way of thinking about strategy. Do some of the experiences below resonate with any of you? Especially when it comes to changing decision-making culture, perhaps?

How do I know it works?

Because I've done it, both in business, and climbing a mountain, pole pole, in real life. And because I see others doing it, and I revel in their stories of the light-bulb moments when they get it for the first time. When an engineer, whose brief is to "design", actually delves into her creative self and designs rather than repeats what has been done before. And once they've experienced the power of design-led thinking, will they not be more open to strategy development based on D+D-D, because they've actually lived it already?

And the blockchain in all this?

I'll save most of my thoughts on that for another day, as many of them are still brewing and I need to consult with some bigger brains than mine to connect a few lonely but enticing dots.

Since Integrated Management (IM) and Integrated Reporting (IR) in business are designed to help businesses report on how they are implementing their strategy to create value using forward-looking indicators, rather than using retroactive financial indicators, and govern that process better, the real-time, microtransaction nature of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) tells me there has to be a way to revolutionise company reporting (for the better, duh) and therefore improve governance. Don and Alex Tapscott have done much to socialise DLT and potential blockchain applications in the "real" world, and have raised many interesting potential applications for trading in stocks of value differently than we do today.

For me, it all boils down to value, how we perceive it beyond simple Financial Capital, how we shift systemic trades of stocks of value between the Capitals to more sustainable levels (big picture stuff) and how we develop and implement robust strategies to create and trade our little stores of Capital (financial, human, social, intellectual, manufactured and natural) in our organisations and communicate with our stakeholders that we're really on our way to the Destination we decided together, in the Direction we agreed. Surely using blockchain based systems, we'll have better insight into how we are creating and trading those stores of Capital, and thus creating or destroying value.