# Your Strategy isn't a Strategy By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2022-10-26 Strategy eats planning for lunch, but strategy is hard, uncertain, complicated, and obscured. No one knows if your strategy will work until it's too late. When a strategy does work we say it was a good idea. Only exceedingly effective or ineffective strategies are remembered. You never hear about a mediocre strategy. However, most things we think of as strategies are plans. Plans are a list of items to be checked off. This is 99% of recorded business activity. Strategies are values and ways of thinking that inform planning. Whether you know it, you always have a strategy informing your plans. Your strategy is your values in pursuit of meaning. For example, improving your technology infrastructure likely reflects an intrinsic belief that technology is a competitive advantage in generating higher profits. Sometimes these beliefs are reflected in the strategy-on-a-page document, but most often they are cultural norms of your organization, industry, or economic system. When you look closely, most organizational strategies, mission statements, and values are plans. Providing excellent customer service is a plan, not a strategy. Doing the right thing is a plan, not a strategy. Serve the community is a plan, not a strategy. None of these get to the heart of what your organization believes. If you look even closer, you'll see that most organizations have the same strategy. Thus, all that matters is who can best execute their plan. This is probably why so much time is spent on planning and execution. At the start of this post, I said strategy eats planning for lunch. This happens because an entirely new or different strategy (i.e. values and beliefs) is incomprehensible and inconceivable to outsiders. They look crazy and behave in weird ways. Competing organizations don't know how to respond. Planning becomes entirely ineffective if an organization with a different strategy starts to win. For example, consider companies that believed that employees performed better when not micromanaged. This led them to embrace remote work a decade before the pandemic. These companies attracted top talent and achieved more with less overhead as a result. But, despite this most companies today still struggle with understanding how this is even possible. These remote first companies look crazy to them and no amount of planning will ever reconcile the gap. Reconciling the gap requires not only understanding your values, but also the values of others. We largely get strategy wrong. We mislabel it as planning, forget it's about what we believe and value, and think it is only about examining ourselves. Correcting these mistakes may make all the difference, but you won't know until it's already happened. Ultimately, this makes strategy a matter of beliefs and not truth. #### Related Items [[Strategy]] [[Planning]] [[Beliefs]] [[Truth]] [[Business]] [[Mission Statements]]