TL;DR:
– View. Plan. Action. Parts I–III distilled (ceo-strategy.nl)
- Three stages, three tests, and the sentence you will reach for at each one to get away from it. Eight minutes, written so that the usual exits are printed on the page before you use them.
- View: you do not have a view, you have a briefing. Everything you know about your own company arrived through someone with a career reason to shape it. The test is a date, not a quarter — when did you last learn something that hurt from a person who was not obliged to tell you? The exit is "I have an open door", which is a filter that selects for the few willing to pay the cost of walking through it.
- Plan: Morgenthau's plan to strip German industry was analytically airtight and would have been a catastrophe, because coherence is not evidence, it is what gets a thing approved. The test is to name what you gave up, who was angry about it, and whether they are still here. If nobody was angry you did not choose, you listed. The exit is "we're keeping our options open".
- Action: not an execution problem, a permission problem. At Chernobyl nobody was stupid and everybody was obedient. The test is who won the last time your process contradicted what a capable person could plainly see, and whether you were relieved. Then count the layers between the person who sees and the person who may act, because that number is your response time. The exit is "we need better communication" — communication is never the problem, politeness is.
- The three failures are one failure, and in every case the something being responded to is you. Your organisation is an accurate instrument and everything frustrating about it is a reading: you have been reading the instrument and calling it the weather. One instruction follows, and it names the person you already thought of.
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Concise, Exec version
View. Plan. Action.
Read it once
The version without the consolation.
Strategy · Parts I–III distilled · CEO-Strategy.nl
Eight minutes. Three stages, three tests, and the sentence you will reach for at each one to get away from it.
Read it straight through without stopping to argue. The arguments will arrive by themselves. Notice which arrives first, and where in your body it lands. That is the finding.
View
You believe you have a clear view of your business.
You have a briefing. Almost everything you know about your own company reached you through people with a career reason to shape it. Not liars. Ordinary people doing the ordinary thing, which is to bring you a version you can receive at no cost to themselves. By the time it arrives it is a description, and a description is the one thing that is never the situation.
Sun Tzu's word is 勢, shì. The weight gathering on one side. The direction the thing wants to run. It is perceived, not assembled, and it cannot be built out of reports, because a report is the past with confidence added.
The test. When did you last learn something about your business that hurt, from someone who was not obliged to tell you? Give the date. Not the quarter. The date.
If no date arrives, you do not have a view. You have coverage.
The exit you will take: I have an open door. An open door is not the absence of a filter. It is a filter that selects for the few people willing to walk through it and absorb the cost. You have met that group. They are not the ones who know.
Plan
You believe your strategy is a choice.
Morgenthau's plan to strip Germany of its industry was analytically airtight. Cause, effect, remedy, clean derivation. It would have been a catastrophe and it was nearly implemented, because coherence is not evidence. Coherence is what gets a thing approved.
The test. Name what you gave up.
Not what you deprioritised. What you closed. Which door, wanted open by a competent person on your team, did you shut, and who was angry about it, and are they still here?
If nothing was closed and nobody was angry, you did not choose. You listed. A strategy that costs nothing to adopt is your present situation with adjectives attached, and it will be taken from you by whoever was willing to pay.
The second test. Could a competent stranger have produced your strategy from the same data? If so, then so could your competitor, and probably has.
The exit you will take: we're keeping our options open. Options are what you buy instead of a bet. A portfolio of them is an unwillingness to see, wearing the clothes of prudence.
Action
You believe you have an execution problem.
You have a permission problem. At Chernobyl the people in the building were trained engineers who had learned to fit the situation into the procedure and report upward. The procedure was the plan. The plan assumed a reactor that no longer existed. Nobody there was stupid. Everybody there was obedient.
The test. Think of the last time your process contradicted what a capable person on the ground could plainly see. Who won?
If the process won and you were relieved that it did, you have your answer, and you should stop calling it culture.
The second test. Count the layers between the person who sees and the person who may act. That number is your response time. Urgency does not change it. Reorganisation does not change it. Only removing layers changes it, and every layer has a name and a salary and will defend itself.
The exit you will take: we need better communication. Communication is never the problem. Politeness is. Nobody says the true thing in the room and everyone holds the real conversation in the corridor afterwards, and you are the reason the corridor exists.
The pattern
The three failures are one failure.
Your view is filtered. Your plan is defensible rather than right. Your people wait. Each of those is a response to something, and in every case the something is you.
That is a measurement, not an accusation. Your organisation is an extremely accurate instrument. Everything you find frustrating about it is a reading. The hedging, the slow decisions, the meetings that agree and produce nothing, the good people who went quiet. All of it is calibrated to what happens when somebody brings you an unwelcome thing.
You have been reading the instrument and calling it the weather.
One thing to do
There is a person in your organisation who has been right and overruled.
You knew who it was before you finished that sentence. The speed of the recognition is the entire point. You already hold the information. You have been declining to act on it.
Go to them. Ask what else they have stopped saying. Then stay quiet for longer than is comfortable, do not explain yourself, and do not fix it in the room.
Everything after that is strategy. Nothing before it was.
The reason you will not do this is that it would mean the last three years were the same year.
That is true whether or not you do it.
The long versions carry the evidence: I View vs analysis, II Plan, III Action. This one carries the cost.