A while back, a seminar participant, who was a senior administrator in local government, showed me a nice 1-page statement that was his organization’s “strategy,” his term for a statement of mission, vision, and values describing the borough’s desire to be a preferred place to live and work. I asked him some questions:

Me: Let’s assume that you showed this statement to the top administrator at a neighboring borough. What would she say?
Him: That’s a nice statement. Our strategy document expresses similar ideas.
Me: Are you in competition for attracting industry and jobs to your borough, and would not the neighboring locale want to have the same industry and jobs?
Him: Yes they would.
Me: So, you are in rivalry with the adjoining borough?
Him: Yes.
Me: But, does this document give guidance to you and your employees on how use your resources?
Him: No it doesn’t. We really don’t have a strategy.

He was holding a list of aspirations and guiding values.  His locale was in a competitive situation. It was substituting a nicely-worded poster for the hard assessment of its situation. His borough had many resources, but it wasn’t using those resources strategically.

Here’s a practical test: You have a strategy if your competitors saw your strategy, would they be worried? If you truly have a strategy, the rival will be worried. They won’t fear your aspirations.

An equally-matched rival should fear your strategy, but won’t fear your aspirations!

Aspirations, for most people and most organizations, are cheery statements that provide a sense of energy and closure. They’re comfortable.

Strategy is Not Long-Range Planning

People often fail to distinguish strategy from long-range planning. The result is “bad strategy;” the appearance that a strategy is present when there is none.

Long-range planning is an effort that is focused far into the future, often years. Long-range planners tend to focus mostly on internally-focused plans to accomplish agreed-on goals. Long-term planning is used to project budgets and so forth into the future. Long-range planners assume that the external environment is relatively stable; therefore, the future is predictable. Waves of change are ignored.

Strategy is different in that strategists believe that the organization must be responsive to a dynamic, changing environment. Strategists are skeptics of someone who assumptions that the environment is stable or the future is predictable. Strategy involves ambiguity. That ambiguity starts with picking signals out of the context, and defining a clear core challenge.

As I have written previously, a strategic initiative is a response to performance gap. It’s purpose is to close it.  A leader of a strategic initiative needs to watch out for the “fluff” of attractive artifacts and documents.

Strategy is “hard work” in the sense that tolerating ambiguity is uncomfortable. Maybe it’s more fun to create multicolored poster or a polished brochure?