While I don’t claim to have any expertise in strategy development, I do have ideas and opinions on what a good strategy looks like. One important aspect is that strategy is more about choices and decisions, and less about planning and execution. Richard Rumelt describes this in terms of Guiding Policies in his Strategy Kernel (which I described in a post on Good Agile / Bad Agile), and Roger Martin has his Strategic Choice Cascade of questions (which I described in a post on Playing to Win). One of my favourite quotes on strategy is from Henry Mintzberg in his paper on Patterns in Strategy Formation where he defines a strategy as “a pattern in a stream of decisions”.
A technique I’ve been using recently to help people frame their strategies as choices is “Even-Over Statements“. As that write-up describes, this is an exercise in getting people to explicitly state the choice of one positive outcome even over another positive outcome. Two important points that I highlight are:
- The choice is between outcomes, and not outputs or activities. In other words there is still freedom to decide how to achieve the outcome.
- Both outcomes are positive, emphasised by the phrase “even over”. The choice should be a difficult tradeoff, and not a simple differentiation between good and bad.
In a recent workshop this exercise led to a very tough, but ultimately valuable and productive conversation, where initially different groups were advocating for diametrically opposed choices. Some suggested choosing A even over B, while others proposed choosing B even over A. The discussion led to a deeper understanding of the the various perspectives and eventually a choice that everyone could agree with and align with.
By defining strategies as choices in this way, we can see how strategy can be used as an enabling constraint, guiding people in the decisions that they make, yet still allowing them to use their skills, experience and knowledge to choose how they actually implement those decisions. In the context of TASTE, the Strategies are Guiding Policies which enable decisions about what Tactics to experiment with, in order to achieve the Aspirations and move in the direction of the True North.
As a final thought, it’s not difficult to spot the similarities between “Even Over Statements” and the Agile Manifesto‘s value statements. I’ve already blogged about interpreting the manifesto as a set of strategic statements. What would happen if those statement were choices between two positive outcomes? As a very quick and simplistic example we could say:
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work, we have come to choose:
- Enabling individuals and interactions even over common processes and tools
- Developing working software even over providing comprehensive documentation
- Collaborating with customers even over sticking to contractual obligations
- Responding to change even over keeping to planned commitments
That is, while the items on the right are good choices, we prefer to choose the items on the left.
As I’ve said before, my intent is not to supersede the Manifesto, but to provide a lens with which to look at it through. I believe that considering Agility as a set of strategic choices in this way in this can be a vert powerful exercise. I’d be interested to hear how others would articulate those choices – let me know in the comments!