Week of 2021-11-08
A strategy and a plan
A colleague asked me this great question: “What’s the difference between a strategy and a plan?” Put very simply, a plan is one way to communicate a strategy. But you know me, I want to get at the subtlety of what this implies.
First up, semantics. I found that when people say “strategy,” they usually mean one of two distinct things. One is the business strategy, which is a whole discipline about the means to obtain durable differentiating business outcomes. This field is well staked-out and I don’t want to trespass there. The other one has a more generic meaning, as in strategy games or strategic thinking, which is usually associated with seeking some long-term outcomes through a series of short-term actions. That’s the one I want to play with.
Applying this definition, most of us operate with some sort of strategy in mind. Unlike that forgetful fish from Finding Nemo, we wish for what we did today to contribute to some longer-term objective. When we believe that it didn’t, we feel like we wasted our time. When we believe that it did, we feel more content: things are going our way.
Working as a group, our good fortune depends (among other things) on how well our actions align toward a common goal. This alignment is an emergent phenomenon: if we end up pulling all different directions, we might be trying really hard, yet make no progress toward the goal. Conversely, we race toward it when we’re aligned. A team leader’s key challenge is making sure that a) there is a high degree of alignment and b) the team’s common goal matches the desired outcomes the leader has in mind.
Somehow, the leader needs to ensure that when team members act in the short term, their actions add up to positive momentum toward where the team is asked to go. Somehow, they need to communicate their strategy: transfer the necessary parts of their strategy from their minds to the minds of the team members.
Plans are an ancient and probably simplest method to do this. Outline all the steps that the team needs to take to get to their objective and communicate them in a resonant way -- usually many times over -- until everyone on the team knows what they are. Plans are amazing, because all we need to do is follow the steps and if we do, we know we’re going in the right direction. They are exceedingly effective in environments where the validity of the strategy can be easily verified. For example, if I walked through a maze and wrote down all the turns, you can follow my plan and know for certain whether it works. From there, a previously treacherous puzzle becomes a slightly annoying routine for everyone who follows the plan. In such a setting, the plan is the strategy.
In more fluid environments, plans tend to rapidly lose their effectiveness. When we don’t know if the maze stayed the same since the last time we traversed it, communicating strategy needs to mature beyond plans. The leader has to transfer not just a particular solution to a particular maze, but the means to solve any maze in a consistent and safe way. To meet their challenge of alignment, they need the team to continue making progress toward the long-term outcome when the circumstances change: collectively inching toward the exit even if the walls in the maze shift and mutate.
So, when we’re looking at a strategy artifact, here are some questions to reflect on. If it looks like a plan, are we operating in a stable, predictable environment? Can we quickly validate that this is the right plan? If so, we’re probably set -- let’s go. Otherwise, we are better off stepping back and investing a bit more time into considering how we share our mental model of the environment with the team to empower them to create and change their plans on the fly in a way that’s still compatible with your strategy.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2021/11/05/a-strategy-and-a-plan/
Communicating strategy as constraints
A click up from a plan is communicating strategy as constraints. When plans are constantly stymied with change, we start seeking the means to describe this change in terms of invariants. We climb up the abstraction ladder to see if there’s less flux up there. Constraints are usually what we encounter next.
An easy way to grok constraints-based strategy communication is to look at sports. Sports are games with well-defined constraints: what’s allowed and not allowed, how one is rewarded or punished while playing. Like structural beams of a house, constraints frame the problem space. If the constraints are stable and well-rounded, we humans are exceedingly good at discerning, adopting them -- and adapting to them. Constraints also serve as generative sources of plans. Instead of having just one plan that is created each time, a good coach will have a whole playbook of plan templates drilled into their teams. When the game begins, there is no one Big Plan: instead, plans emerge and evolve from the playbook’s templates. My friend Alex Russell had this really nice “beat saber block” analogy. When the team communicates their strategy in terms of constraints, plans -- like blocks from that VR game -- materialize a short distance out, while being informed by a larger arc of the story, framed by constraints.
That’s what makes communicating strategy as constraints so much more effective than producing plans -- and also a lot more challenging. To communicate them, a leader needs to first devise a set of constraints that capture the nature of the game they want to be played. This requires strategic awareness, rigor, and patience. Though my inner game designer momentarily rejoices at the opportunity, it’s incredibly difficult in my experience. Instead of inventing a new game, this effort is mostly about inferring some semblance of stability out of the churning stew of the environment. As a result, most constraint sets come out dismally misshapen in their first iteration.
Usually, they are leaky. For example, imagine that I provided a constraint that the score is only awarded when the hockey puck crosses the goal line, but forgot to specify the size of the goal. It is fairly easy to see how an overly clever team might be tempted to bolster their defenses by shrinking the goal to be smaller than the puck -- this may or may not be a true story from my childhood.
They also tend to be either too specific or too broad. Go too specific, and you’re back in the plans territory. Go too broad, and the constraints are no longer useful. In one of the dimmer moments of my career, I once proclaimed that the goal of our team would be to “not screw it up” in the next year. Great! What does that even mean, oh fearless leader?!
An experienced leader -- just like a seasoned coach -- usually carries a playbook that allows them to sketch out a decent initial set of constraints for any team. However, I found that getting constraints to the point where they’re stable and well-rounded is something that can only happen by the team collectively participating in refining the rules of the game by which they play.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2021/11/07/communicating-strategy-as-constraints/
Enumerating constraints
The process of inferring a set of constraints with which to communicate a strategy can get pretty overwhelming, so I made this handy little framework for enumerating them. It’s not a complete taxonomy, but hopefully it’s generative enough to get started.
When looking for constraints, I use a riff on Lawrence Lessig’s pathetic dot framing. Think of constraints as loosely bunched into four different forces that press from every direction: capabilities, rules, norms, and incentives. Their sum is what defines the game being played.
From the bottom, we are supported -- and limited -- by our capabilities. These are our team’s strengths and weaknesses and understanding them greatly helps us assess our potential. What is the team’s mix of senior and junior members? How do their collective skills map to the challenge at hand? What are particular things that make this team unique? What are the known failure modes the team might be susceptible to?
At the top, there are rules that are imposed on us by the environment. These could be related to funding or deadlines, or priorities of the larger organization. Market and ecosystem forces also fit in here. A good way to spot these kinds of constraints is to look for things that we perceive as happening regardless of our attempts to control them. These are our threats and opportunities.
Forming the vertical axis, rules and capabilities are in tension with each other. Usually, one acts as a limit to another, establishing dynamic equilibrium. If there’s no such equilibrium between these two, it’s not a game. When listing out rules and capabilities, make sure that the sets feel roughly evenly matched. Otherwise, we might be deceiving ourselves about the nature of the game.
The horizontal axis captures constraints that reflect dynamics within the team. Just like with the game axis, these forces are in tension. If they are mismatched, there is no team.
On one side, there are incentives. Incentives are what drives individual agency within the team. In this bunch, there are constraints that define the reward system for the team. How do the individuals know if they are succeeding or failing? How do they know whether they are progressing along their intended career arc? Are they making the kind of impact that is aligned with the team’s objectives? This one can be tricky. For example, in larger organizations, the incentive structure is commonly imposed centrally, which means that the team leads might find that their objectives are often at odds with that structure (like the “I don’t want to work on this project, because there’s no promo for me in it” case). In such a case, those are better viewed as rules (the top-down arrow), rather than team incentives.
On the other side, there are norms that bind us together. “Bind” is the operative word, because the thing that binds us always acts as a constraint. Cultural norms define what’s acceptable and not acceptable within the team. Norms are tricky, because “culture” has developed a bit of a duality in modern organizations. There’s the norms that we’d like the team to have and there are the norms that exist. If we use this exercise to evangelize the former, we might arrive at communicating a strategy for some other, imaginary team. For example, if we aspire to triage bugs within 24 hours as a team, this is not a constraint. Instead, the constraint is the actual time it takes today -- our norm.
As we enumerate constraints, a picture of the playing field emerges. If our norm is that it takes us 7 days to triage a bug, yet one of the looming threats is our customers consistently finding our support levels lacking, we look to the counterbalancing constraints. For example, there might be incentives or capabilities we underutilize that we could lean onto -- and this thinking process leads to generating various plans to accomplish that. Add a solving diverge-converge exercise to pick the best alternative, and now we’re cooking with gas. Shifting from plan-based strategies to constraints-based strategies creates more cognitive load on the team -- planning becomes a much more distributed process -- but it also dramatically increases the team’s capacity to navigate flux. More importantly, understanding constraints creates a space for team leaders to examine them and mutate them to intentionally change the game.