How do you get to better strategy?
It is easy to think that improving something means making changes to the thing itself.
E.g. if you want to become a better long distance runner, run more. Or if you want to become better at painting, then buy the best painting app and a better drawing board.
But this isn’t always the case. Maybe to become better at running you need to learn about nutrition (as your stomach and energy levels keep failing you), and to become a better painter you need to study other painters (as your style is expressionless and empty..).
I’ve had the same experience with strategy.
Ten years back or so I was working as a strategist and I could clearly see that when my strategy was bad the execution was always bad, but when my strategy was good there was a better chance of the creative being good as well.
This led me to ask: what leads to better strategy?
And my answer was: better insights!
If the information and experiences you have access to are poor the strategy is going to be poor. Strategy is not magic, it won’t invent itself out of thin air.
I’ve seen this countless times. People come up with boring, repetitive, top-of-mind strategies — not because they are bad at strategy, but because their information and insights were boring, repetitive and top-of-mind to begin with.
I used to work with a company that had a yearly workshop on the same topic, and every year they came up with the same ideas. Not because they were not creative or original, but because the people and the information they brought into the room were the same every year.
A former colleague once told me “we are the same people, with the same ideas going into the same room every year .. ofcourse we come up with the same output”.
And I once sat with a client suggesting that we were going to come up with something that they’ve never seen before which would blow the socks of their customers. But that they were not going to have to make any gutsy or risky decisions. They were in fact going to make the most boring decisions they’ve ever made. Because we were going to get to our answers by introducing a completely new set of information to base our decisions on. We did, they did and the customers loved it.
When it comes to strategy, the first way to improve it is to improve the data, information, insights and experiences available to inform and influence the strategy. It is of course not the only way to get to good strategy, but if your information is bad, the chance of getting to a good strategy is extremely slim.
To make better strategies start with the insights.
