Mastering Strategy: Transforming Ideas into Accomplishments
Planning: how to do it & why.
Planning is essential for any endeavor.
From a trip to the store to a trip across the globe: everything we do requires some level of strategic thinking and implementation.
So why do so many business owners skip strategic planning?
You’re always having ideas about the things you can do, the impact your business can have in your community or for your clients, how you can grow, morph and improve your product or service.
But how do you go from idea to reality?
Do you just keeping going along waiting for the timing to be right?
You can also make a plan, outlining specific things you can do in order to act intentionality towards materializing your idea.
Objections to Strategy
Be strategic is difficult and challenging. It’s a skill like any other.
Because of this, strategic thinking is often criticized.
The term ‘strategy’ is also used in reference to a partcilulary manipulative type of marketing that employs preset strategies in order to appeal to certain demographics, regardless of product or service efficacy.
Others say that there strategy is a device of the manipulative.
To all of these objections and more, I say that strategy is a human constant: strategy is simply being able to imagine the path from where you currently are to where you’d like to be as well as your own role within that journey.
Simply put: we aim to reach our goals as efficiently as possible while remaining flexible enough to adapt to necessary changes and to take on exciting opportunities when they present themselves. All while maintaining priorities toward given directives, defined by you (or you and your team) and implemented by you (or you and your team).
How to Employ Strategy
The great thing about strategy is that it’s like anything else. You get to see what others have done, use it if you like it or develop your own method.
When it comes to building a business or establishing ourselves in our field, we get to do the same thing.
When I was younger, I made the assumption that there are strategies that work and there are strategies that don’t work. And that the one’s that work were some sort of secret held by the successful.
Thankfully, I was wrong. The strategies that work are the ones that make sense to you, challenge you, require you to seek help, but most of all: a strategy that is going to work for you has to be the one that you’re able to stick to.
Every strategy requires 9 things:
Imagine and define your goal.
Be extremely – brutally – honest about where you are now and the gap to what your goal is.
Gather knowledge about everything you don’t know (get answers to all of the questions that come up).
Write down the steps (between ‘now’ and ‘future goal’) you can currently imagine and plot them in a timeline.
Gather more knowledge answering all of the questions that you now have realizing the gaps between steps.
Plot more steps in the timeline.
Determine a real-time range for your timeline(i.e. 6 months, 3 years, 15 years, etc).
Implement.
Refine.
Be strategic, on purpose
Finding the best routes through my neighborhood to the places I go most often is one my greatest reminders of what being strategic is truly like.
Deciding that we want to turn an idea into something real out into the world, we force additional responsibility on ourselves, which can be overwhelming.
So remember this: it doesn’t all come at once. Approach what you don’t know as an opportunity to learn. Think of the things you don’t know how to do as skills you get to acquire.
This isn’t just a journey to ‘starting’ or ‘founding’ something: this is also your journey, your development and your growth.
