If I asked you for your 2025 strategy, would you be able to give it to me? So what's interesting is every time I would go in to help a new team through a transformation, the first question I would always, always ask is, can you share with me your strategy? Because we always build teams, processes, ways of working around your strategy.
And what's interesting is no matter what time of the year, a lot of leaders would bulk at this. I would ask for a strategy and it's like, oh gosh, like, let me get it all together for you and I'll send it over. And that is because most leaders equate strategy with these giant, ahem, PowerPoint decks. These, you know, Lists of endless metrics and KPIs, um, or my favorite, like initiative overload.
Like here are the 15 initiatives we're working on this year. Or giant Gantt charts of, um, endless timelines of everything their team's going to be working on. And the thing is, when I asked that question, they, it's not that they weren't capable of of telling me their strategy. It's that they equated strategy with some overly complex output instead of simply a way of thinking a direction for their team, a plan for how they were going to achieve that direction.
Now this isn't by their own doing. This is traditional corporate mindset. So Corporate systems, if we go back to the beginning of time, they were built around predictability, control, hierarchy. So the majority of our management systems come from the like, like industrial type businesses. So factory style working.
And in that time, Business moved very slow. We didn't have technology that was constantly disrupting things. So, what they were leaning into was what brought me better than all the competitors, was how quickly I could move and how reliable my service was. Well, what does that mean? Okay, how can we control?
How can we reduce risk? How can we make it so insanely predictable our output? Well, that is through hierarchy. That's through command and control. That's through these rigorous plans. And now because businesses weren't moving fast, that was okay to prioritize accountability and risk management over agility and innovation.
But the problem is That, that has completely flipped its head. Now, we are all about moving fast. And the problem is that we're still operating from those old school beliefs, and that has reinforced That you, as the leader, need to have all the answers and anticipate every possible what if, every possible scenario, and create these fail proof, risk aversion plans.
But when you spend all this time creating these endless PowerPoint decks Sorry, guys. I'm outside this morning, uh, taking a walk and my dog is getting really excited about some birds. Okay, so what I was saying, when you take all this time spending months creating these giant fail proof plans, these endless lists of OKRs and objectives and initiatives, Yes, they might give you a sense of safety, however, they don't adapt.
They are not agile. They move very slowly. Because if one thing changes, and it will, because that is just the environment that we are in, you are now going to have to change your entire strategy. And you have this. This ginormous, complex, monstrous strategy that lives in a 100 page PowerPoint deck and an endless list of KPIs.
And so it's very hard for it to move. And the, when you have all of that, the problem why I, leaders, I believe recognize this. They know that the way that we're doing strategy is no longer working. They know that the fact that they are setting these strategies and they are immediately no longer relevant a month later is no longer working.
But we keep doing that. Why? It's because these strategies that look exhaustive, with pages of metrics and models and forecasts and contingency plans, they're safe. In a world where we as the leader feel accountable, For every tiny thing, every failure our team has this plan, it's like defensive planning.
It's less about like, how can our team be agile and make the biggest impact? And it's more about how can I show that I did my best to think about Every single possible scenario so that if something goes wrong, I have this fallback. Strategy has become less about actual strategic thinking and more about justifying our actions.
Justifying it to the executive leader who asks you for your strategy at the beginning of the year. Justifying it to, um, whoever, your stakeholders. Justifying it to the second you're not hitting your metric. You have something giant to pull up and say, Well, look, we've thought it all through. We have lost the art of strategic thinking in defensive planning, in these templates, in these giant deliverables.
And that is why, when I ask the question, what is your strategy for 2025? Your brain freezes and says, well, I need to go dig up my PowerPoint deck. I need to go grab my list of deliverables. And that is not serving your team because if you are unable to communicate your strategy to me without a PowerPoint deck, how are you communicating it to your team in a way that they can understand and a way that they can get behind?
If I ask you your strategy, you should be able to tell me in a second what your long term three to five year vision is. Where you are trying to go long term, because our teams aren't just here to run on a hamster wheel day in and day out. We are here to drive towards some sort of impact, and you should be able to tell me right now, what are the biggest gaps between your team And achieving that long term vision.
What are the biggest things preventing you from getting there? And there might be a list a mile long, but you should be able to tell me the biggest, the top three to five ones that are most impactful, whether it be something to do with a missing skill set, a capability gap, um, a process. That's slowing your team down.
A lack of resources, an area, a technology gap. You should be able to tell me off the top of your head, the top three to five biggest gaps you need to solve and focus on. And then you should be able to tell me how you're going after those this year, not just in some list of initiatives, but actually telling me the strategic shifts to how your team operates, how your team is structured, how your team is behaving.
in order to tackle those gaps and move you significantly closer in 2025 to achieving your vision. If that doesn't roll off your head, if that's not something that you can immediately come up with, we need to break free from the defensive planning, corporate conditioning, and we need to invest in our strategic planning skill set.
We need to build that skill set because of that right there. Is your ticket to one leading your team with clarity and confidence, but also continuing to grow your leadership career beyond your current level. And if that's what you're after, you need to be in activating strategy. We'll drop that in the link below.
Okay guys, let's go do the work.
