Hello KSKOers
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about strategy. Well, I think it’s strategy….
It might be frameworks. Or maybe it’s structure. Or actually it could just be simplicity. Join me on my journey of making the complex, simple, the theoretical practical and the inaccessible, accessible.
Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!
Over the last few years I’ve been involved in articulating organisations’ objectives, aims, goals, missions and visions. Both facilitating others in the pursuit, as well as setting down my own. I love nothing more than gathering ideas and thematising them so that the bigger picture becomes clear, the pillars are accessible and the work streams are understood.
Moving from complexity to simplicity is a joy. And consolidating 100 conversations into 100 words, a pleasure.
On the one hand it’s an intellectual challenge and on the other it’s an accessibility essential.
Strategy is a Relationship
I had a brilliant conversation with Jeroen Kraaijenbrink in Episode 16 of The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast.
We talked about self-awareness, leadership and strategy and one thing he said has stuck with me: strategy only works if it’s a participative activity. Which means the language of strategy matters enormously.
If the conversations that built it weren’t genuinely participative, if people didn’t feel heard, if their ideas weren’t woven into something they recognise, then the strategy belongs to its authors. Not to the organisation. And if it belongs only to its authors, it will never travel far enough through the organisation and beyond, to do its job.
That’s the nub of it, really. Strategy has to travel. Through teams, through conversations, through the everyday decisions people make without even realising they’re making a strategic choice. And it can only travel if it’s simple enough to carry.
The Words We Give People
When you have few words to name your themes, people can associate with them. They can repeat them and they can connect with them. They are recognisable, promotable and, in the best sense, marketable. In moving organisations towards a goal, people need to hear them often. They should be consistently shared and transparently pursued. And they should be clear points of………
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