Strategise

In your new role, you make and execute a strategy. That sounds simple, but dig deeper. When do you define what 'strategy' means? How do you 'strategise' when you're alone in your office? What's the difference between strategising - as an action - in this role compared with your last role?

This is an important question as your answer determines the facts, decisions and emotionally charged conversations that will occupy you. 

Strategy takes time; executing strategy in-the-moment means also taking long term patterns into account. It means making high stakes decisions where uncertainty makes any decision imperfect. That's confronting, especially if you're new to a role.  

Here are some possible clues about how to strategise effectively, alone and in the moment:

1 Access the best available data about the long term future and use the organisation's strategic intent as a compass and filter in choosing what's relevant. Is this data relevant to where we want to be? Is our strategy sensitive to this data? 

2 Reflect as well as think. Complexity and uncertainty mean you have to let a pattern emerge and determine your weighting of all the different factors. Accept the probabilities of the imperfect decision - but one that's made rather than left to float. Find a confidant outside the organisation who helps you develop your ideas without inserting their biases. 

3 Make 'strategising' a regular ritual, fenced off against the rush of transactions that the system thrusts at you. Just as the organisation has a strategy process, you need similar space, time, silence and process.

4 At the right time, cut to a real decision, a go/no go on an investment, approval of a risky innovation project, hiring someone better than you for a key role. Communicate it with clarity but also with a story that makes its meaning and relevance stick with those affected. 

In the early phase of a new role you may feel you lack the tools and information you need to lay out a brilliant (and ironclad) strategy for all time. The organisation however, is waiting for your wisdom. If you're strategising well as a continuous discipline, you'll also be adaptive when facts or circumstances change. 

Effective solo strategising means :

• align with the firm's strategic intent
• use good data
• set aside strategy time - it's different from action time
• however you decide and act, the story that communicates your decision is at least as important as your reasoning.