This is an update to a recent post on how to include The Crux in the X-Matrix. In that post, I posited that Aspirations could be framed in terms of the Crux. On reflection, I would now agree with Mike Burrows’ comment on LinkedIn. He suggested that it could go “right there in the middle”.
The Key Points
Throughout his book The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists, Rumelt continually emphasises a few key points:
- Strategy is based on challenge. A good strategy identifies “the most important part of a set of challenges that is addressable, having a good chance of being solved by coherent action”. Thus, the challenge is central to strategy.
- Strategy is the result of creative design, not analytical selection. It requires situational awareness and an understanding of the specific context. Thus, the challenge is part of a wider landscape that needs to be explored.
- Strategy comes before goals. Before we decide on goals and actions, we need to determine what is important and addressable, as well as where we want to focus. Thus, the challenge should be identified first.
All of that leads me to wonder whether, rather than framing the Aspirations in terms of the Crux, it is better to make it part of the True North.
The X-Matrix
The Crux is something that is located and surmounted, not defined and delivered, so it provides a sense of direction. In other words, orientation is towards the Crux, and the focus of decisions is about how to overcome it. Aspirations still exist as business ambitions and results. However, Rumelt is clear that strategy formation (in what he calls a Strategy Foundry) should be decoupled from budgeting and forecasting. A strategy is not to achieve some financial goals.
Strategies are then the goals and guiding policies which emerge from the identification of the Crux. They describe how we will approach overcoming the Crux, with Tactics still being the coherent action and Evidence being how progress will be assessed.
The Conclusion
Thus, a Strategy Foundry can use the X-Matrix as a foundational format for its agenda. The Crux becomes the True North at its centre, which can now be described as “the addressable critical challenge that we are orienting towards overcoming“. Aspirations, Strategies, Tactics and Evidence all sit around this True North, and the X-Matrix provides a means with which to check for coherence.