Acting with intent
Many times when a company engages in a strategic planning effort, the people involved will employ a framework such as GSOT (Goals, Strategy, Objectives and Tactics) to connect the dots between the 90,000' view and what needs to happen on the ground. High level goals might be "we need to increase our profitability by 10% this year", or "our new product will become the market leader in its category". How will these statements of ambition happen exactly?
A good strategy isn't a statement like "we will drop our costs of production by X" -- that's a hope. (Hope is not a good strategy!) The strategy needs to contain a hypothesis, a fulcrum on which some leverage rests, suggestive of actions that the planners believe will cause the desired shift towards meeting the goal.
Objectives are measurable, concrete steps to test the hypothesis along the way. And finally, the tactics are the specific actions along the way. Good companies operate with intention. There are goals. There are hypotheses about the steps the company and its workers can take to effect outcomes and steer the company's performance. Good companies also manage and track the objectives and actions everyone takes to focus towards the goals. This is necessarily somewhat top-down. If all the employees have their own differing visions and don't go along with the plan, that implies failures of leadership.
These ideas aren't just for companies-- they're available to all of us. The most successful people do this personally. We need to go beyond deciding moment to moment what makes the most sense, making decisions in a reactive way.
So, if you're looking at others - and wondering - how did they get where they are? If you're thinking it looks pretty easy for them! Don't be fooled; that's an illusion. As any sports fan knows, skill makes things look easy. Practice makes performance seem effortless. It's a mistake to think what you see on the surface is all there is. In my experience ALL successful leaders cultivate specific practices. While most accomplished people will readily admit the role of luck and privilege, the real foundation of their success is acting consistently over time with intention.
Tomorrow we'll talk about how to begin constructing your own practice.
Photo by Alfonso Betancourt on Unsplash
