Great Leadership Requires That Your Strategy is Distinct From Your Tactics
The Momentum Framework
Frameworks, even those that are flawed, are critical tools for leaders. Having a system to help you think clearly, segment activities, and create priorities, will help you to create momentum and scale thinking through those you lead. It will help you achieve better strategic and tactical outcomes. The higher up you go in an organization, the more important it is to be able to share ideas and structure thinking in a memorable way.
Frameworks
A good framework will serve to order the thinking of your team in ways that align them, project confidence, and, elicit intrinsically motivated, authentic commitment. It will reduce the collective cognitive load associated with strategy and prioritization and allow your teams to spend more time creating and working toward your shared strategic goals. Analogies, metaphors, and contextual models, in the form of a framework, will help us scale our leadership through others. When your teams are using the same language and shared context, through metaphors, your outcomes will improve.
Language and the context that we create with it, shape everything that people, in groups, do together. If you don’t share metaphors and models with your teams that are “sticky,” you will have a hard time getting things done when you are not in the room. A good framework will allow you to tell stories from history that are consistent with the model and explain what worked and what might have worked better. More importantly, a good framework will help you to create metaphors and structure thinking in a way that will help your people and your teams adapt in the future.
“Metaphor is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects.” (adapted)— Lackoff & Johnson
Humility and Genius
It is important to know and to communicate humility to your team around whatever frameworks you decide to implement. There is no perfect framework, no ideal model, and no metaphor that will answer every question or solve every problem. If there were, we wouldn’t need the creative genius of the people we lead. The point is to achieve better outcomes together. Your team should also know that you are willing to adapt or completely change your frameworks if they are not helping you achieve better outcomes. As George Box famously said:
“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.” — George Edward Pelham Box
When you don’t have a framework or use one that is grossly incomplete, it strains your team, leads to confusion, apathy, waste, and frustration. I’ve worked on teams without a clear framework for thinking, resulting in a misguided strategy and the results were catastrophic. This is much more common than it should be.
A Case Study
On one high-profile product team, the directive was for the team to “lift and shift” the application to a modern technology stack without adding or modifying any features. The only “strategy” provided, in this case, was “There is a grave concern that the stock price will be impacted.” There were obvious underlying ulterior motives, such as the implied impact on bonuses. Working off of this tactical directive caused the team to make terrible decisions for their users. The leadership team was well-meaning, as they believed that the market would respond negatively if they found out that the product was built on a deprecated technology. However, the team had years worth of product feedback that they could have acted on to improve the experience, but no consideration was given to the user's concerns or the reasons for the product’s existence. You could feel the underlying cognitive dissonance in the conversations that were occurring on the teams when the leaders were not present. When the users eventually got their hands on this new release, the response had the opposite effect that the leaders expected. Not only was the team’s motivation negatively impacted through the course of the project, but the customer’s response to the resulting product was also dramatically negative. The product had to be rebuilt. They lost almost an entire year of effort and wasted a lot of money. This was unnecessary. Had the leadership team used a strategic framework and been purposeful about setting a clear and motivating vision for the product (the components of a healthy strategy) and allowed the team to adjust the tactics, the team may have thrived and the customer relationship may have grown much sooner.
The Great Oxymoron
Productive, thriving teams are driven by a powerful strategy that allows their tactics to deviate to meet the ever-changing demands of their environment. “Strategic Planning” is an oxymoron. When leaders muddle their strategy into their tactics, they create “Strategic-Plans” that do not differentiate one from the other. Most strategic plans are a muddled collection of experimental tactics aiming at different market segments or pools of perceived capital. If you want to improve your odds of success, distinguish your strategy from your tactics and break them down into their component parts. This article will serve as a framework to help leaders shift their mindset about strategy and tactics.
About 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu had a similar opinion when he wrote “The Art of War.” I don’t speak or read languages the book was originally written in, but I have read a few different translations of the book from my library and that I have purchased and in all of them, the book is clearly separated into two distinct sections. The first section is on “strategem” and the second, on “tactics.” This distinct separation alone is instructive. When teams are purposeful with their language, time, and focus when they are “strategizing,” motivation of the team improves and creates better long-term results. It provides for more alignment and clarity when developing and curating tactics. There is a famous quote, attributed to Sun Tzu that supports this simple idea:
If the goal is to create positive organizational momentum (I will define this word more specifically later in the article,) I propose a way to express this relationship with a mathematical formula:
Let’s relate this to business by first talking about the tactics. We could define tactics as follows:
Tactics are the components that determine “how” the business of the organization gets done. When we keep the tactics separate from our strategy, it gives us more flexibility in determining the best practices and capabilities that we should employ to achieve sustainable outcomes. We also have a clearer understanding of our strengths and weaknesses with regards to our capabilities so that we know where we should focus our investments in our tactical inputs. With a clearly articulated strategy that the entire team is signed up for, establishing your shorter-term tactics will be easier and more fruitful. I will come back to components of the strategy and its formation in detail later in the article.
TACTICAL GOALS: PROFIT
I am putting tactics before strategy in this discussion because business people have been conditioned throughout history to optimize their tactics first. The historical language of business is centered on optimizing profits, return on investment, or return on capital. Profit is a primary tactical “goal” that every for-profit enterprise on the planet shares, for example. Governmental organizations and non-profits talk about their “goals” in a different way, but every organization needs to demonstrate some tactical ROI (Return On Investment for the capital deployed. An organization, or at a minimum, its leadership, cannot survive for very long without an ROI and it may never thrive without the future prospect of economic sustainability.
Frederick Taylor, one of the world’s first management consultants popularized the concept of “scientific management” to the business world in the early 1900s. His thinking pervades much business thinking and leadership to this day. Milton Friedman cemented a similar mindset into the capitalist's ethos in his book “Capitalism and Freedom” through his words:
— Milton Friedman
This concept has driven decades of MBA (Masters of Business Administration) programs, corporate decision making, and executive compensation schemes with the mantra of “Shareholder Value.” When I studied for my MBA in 2006, for example, one of the first books we read for class was “The Goal,” by Elijou Goldratt. He introduced the class to the “Theory of Constraints” through a well-written parable about a business leader who found success by systematically eliminating bottlenecks in the pursuit of profit maximization. It is another body of work that builds on both Taylor and Friedman’s drive for profit as the primary and solitary business motive.
All organizations need to maximize their tactical ROI so that they can invest in the future. The more capital an organization has available through its efficient operation, the more available options there are for future investment in their ecosystem.
Profit is the ultimate, tactical measure of success. But, it is a lagging indicator of strategic success.
There are a few behavior-distorting dysfunctions, however, associated with using an economic ROI as the driving, north-star metric for a business. I have written much about the relationship between organizational metrics and some of these dysfunctions before, so I won’t go into it here. I will point out, however, that ROI is necessary for tactical success, but insufficient to maximize strategic, long-term success. I will return to this when I discuss strategic goals.
TACTICAL FLOW
Organizational tactics are made up of the capability (inputs) of the organization and the execution and delivery of artifacts and services (outputs) that are created and delivered by the organization to its customers in the course of business. The management of the firm’s tactical inputs and outputs determine “how” the organization will achieve its strategy. If I were to represent an organization's tactics in a linear swim lane, it would look like the diagram below. Every business takes income, generally from its revenue (or investment), and organizes it into a set of capabilities, or inputs, that it then turns into the execution of deliverables or outputs that result in an experience for your customers. The experience you produce through your product or service for your customer determines the amount of capital that will be returned to the organization to be used for future investment. In business, we call this capital a profit and it has historically been considered the ultimate tactical business outcome.
Sometimes your inputs get disrupted. If your firm is small and a key employee quits or a key vendor goes out of business, you have to scramble to fill the gaps. If you run a manufacturing firm and a new process improvement comes along in your industry that will cut out 10% of costs for any firm that adopts that innovation, investments are necessary or future profitability might be threatened. The same with the organization’s outputs. Adjustments must be made to your distribution, logistics, service roadmaps, or artifacts to deal with the realities and changes in market conditions. A useful way to look at tactics is as the combination of these two variables. Thus, a definition for tactics might look like this:
An organization’s tactics are the combination of the capabilities nurtured and the execution required to produce a healthy and sustainable return on investment.
TACTICAL MATH
If either of the components in the formula is ineffective, the inputs (capability) or the corresponding outputs (execution,) you do not have effective tactics. Both components are required to create anything of value in the world and in the context of a business. Additionally, you will never be done maximizing either variable. They are critical parts of the infinite game of business. A simple mathematical breakdown of the tactics would be as follows:
While this may seem like an over-simplification, it provides a simple, but powerful way to look at the symptoms of function and dysfunction. I use multiplication because if either component is zero, it zeroes out your tactics. It provides powerful language tools for a leader to better diagnose troubles and understand where to prioritize a team’s efforts. Let’s break down the components of tactics.
TACTICAL INPUTS: CAPABILITIES
An organization’s capabilities are its tactical inputs. It includes both the physical inputs, raw materials, tools of the trade, etc., and the organization's ability to adapt, grow and learn how to optimize its skills in the delivery of its products and services. A company will always be striving to achieve maximum capacity and enhance its capabilities. At any given time, every firm has a fixed set of skills, talent, knowledge, tools, and equipment that make up its capabilities. They may be fixed at the moment, but they can always be upgraded and must be maintained in order to maintain competitive positioning. The more abstract human capabilities, like skills, talent, knowledge, and the ability to problem-solve that your teams employ can always be improved, refined, and optimized. A leader is never done thinking about how to optimize an organization’s capabilities.
Many of the capabilities required to serve the firm’s customers are unique to the industry the firm is in. Getting really good at the capabilities that differentiate the firm can provide an incredible tactical advantage. Clearly articulating the firm’s vision, through an understanding of who the firm serves and what problems it solves for them will help to define the capabilities that the firm should be trying to optimize and which capabilities might be allowed to atrophy. If leaders are not purposeful about these decisions, with an eye on the organizational strategy, they will be made in an ad-hoc fashion, not necessarily aligned with the firm’s long-term vision.
Understanding your capabilities and how they serve the needs of your customers is one of the essential components to maximizing momentum. Most organizations today rely on the creativity of their teams to thrive. When you understand your gaps in capabilities, as they are aligned to your strategic goals, you can produce clear growth paths for your organization, its teams, and its people so that they are always learning. Thus, regularly evaluating your capabilities and having an objective assessment of your strengths and weaknesses is a key business task. Leaders must put guardrails in place that ensure that learning is occurring regularly and at all levels. If one team is growing but another is not, it will manifest in silos and teams being frustrated with each other. If one individual is growing, but another is not, the same thing can happen within even the smallest teams. Everyone needs to have some path for growth available to them, or you cannot possibly maximize their motivation and thus, their creativity. The more complicated the role and the more creativity required, the more important it is to ensure that people are growing and learning in the context of their work.
TACTICAL OUTPUTS: EXECUTION
Your organization’s execution is represented by how it organizes its tactical outputs and can be measured by the ability to produce a great experience for its customers. It can be tangibly observed in the tactical services that you deploy and all of the artifacts that are delivered in the course of business. In the software development industry, from which I came, tactical outputs include the code that is placed in the code repository, the design and user experience, the features that we deploy, all of the artifacts that we deliver to support the code along the way, and the experience of our stakeholders. An organization that is executing well, has good quality outputs, high throughput, and produces a great experience for all of its stakeholders. An optimally operating team often finds itself in a state of flow in its work which results in innovation.
Measuring the quality of execution is challenging and varies widely by industry. Great companies create great experiences for their customers and find creative ways to measure the quality of the customer experience, which is a great measure of an organization’s tactical output. Companies often only focus on productivity measures, which can be detrimental to the customer experience when they are over-focused on. Understanding your ability to execute to serve the needs of your customers is one of the essential components to maximizing momentum. In organizations that rely on the creativity of their teams, it is more important to understand how your teams are executing. Teams that maximize their “time in a flow state,” in the context of their work are more creative and derive more satisfaction from their work. Leaders should put guardrails in place that ensure that customer and employee experience is healthy. If one team is executing well but another is not, it will manifest in silos and teams being frustrated with each other. If one individual is executing well, but another is not, the same thing will happen.
EVOLUTION
Tactics need to flex and adapt as quickly and purposefully as possible in the face of a changing environment. This is what allows a business to evolve. We typically think of the evolution of business as the things leaders do to “evolve their strategy.” But that isn’t quite the right use of the word — it is not how evolution works. The neuroendocrinologist, primatologist, and prolific author Robert Sapolsky defines evolution eloquently as:
“The ability to run faster and faster in the face of a changing environment.”
- Robert Sapolsky
He explains how the natural world works and how the organisms that survive are the ones that are built to be flexible and can adapt to whatever the environment deals them. When they don’t, they die, and ultimately, their species die out. The business world is not much different.
An organization’s tactics should be decided at the ground level, by the smart people that have been hired to execute it. Those closer to the action your people are, the more specific information they will have available. They also spend more time thinking about and interacting with the customer and are in a better position to take actions in the environment when it changes. When the people at the ground level are aligned to a motivating strategy, the results are almost always better. The more flexible the capabilities and their ability to execute are, the more adaptable and resilient the organization will be. An organization’s tactics should act like water. Water, given enough time, can erode entire mountains and will work through any terrain to get to the ocean. Its course is shaped by the territory over which it flows, but it adapts immediately to the current obstacle and takes on whatever shape is necessary to get to the destination. Given enough time, a worthy destination, and the right capabilities, anything can be accomplished by a team of capable and motivated people if you give them the flexibility to adapt.
- Sun Tzu
When the tactics are kept clearly separated from the strategy, it becomes obvious when there is a misalignment between the two. When you are able to keep them aligned but clearly separate, both can be achieved in concert.
STRATEGY
Now that we have dealt with the more tactile, observable, and concrete part of leading an organization, let’s deal with the harder to observe, more abstract part, the strategy.
Strategy is a word used by leadership teams to mean a wide variety of abstract concepts. Without a clear delineation of where the strategy ends and the plan begins, confusion creeps in. Don’t get me wrong, engaging in planning and thinking through tactics is always valuable, however, merging the two can be sloppy and misguided. Strategy and tactics are two separate things and I have observed that the most successful teams and organizations maintain this separation mindset with vigor. When they are blended, it results in thrashing and misdirected activity with different factions heading in different directions. When a strategy is not clear, teams are seen regularly shifting their day-to-day priorities and focus. It results in confusion, which invariably leads to a lack of motivation. Many of the modern thought leaders on corporate strategy like Michael C. Jensen, one of the founding fathers of the William E. Simon School, Michael Porter from Harvard Business School, and many others have taught modern MBA’s that there are a multitude of valuable tactical frameworks available to help leaders optimize for profit. Few of the frameworks take a holistic view separating strategy clearly from tactics. There is a need for a framework that will help leaders isolate and distinguish their strategy from their tactics so that they can drive a shared understanding of both. Being purposeful with strategy and making sure that is about the long term impact on the people in the organization’s ecosystem will help leaders purposefully create an environment in which their organizations can thrive through a sustainable, positive culture. When we build our culture around clear language, it minimizes confusion and makes it easier to inspire teams to be more creative in the pursuit of motivating goals.
STRATEGIC GOALS: RELATIONSHIPS
With a clearly articulated true north, a group of people can put a man on the moon, win wars, build sustainable businesses, create unexpected change and drive innovation in our organizations. It starts with having strategic goals that motivate the people being led. When your vision includes articulated goals that are worth achieving, it inspires people to organize more purposefully, to grow and to stretch their own capabilities to achieve it.
“Human beings are most motivated by a search for meaning”
- Viktor Frankl
I’ve written much about the power of human-oriented goals. Motivating goals are the key outcomes that when achieved, fulfill meaning for people through their work. This is the concept of relatedness, from Self-Determination-Theory, in action. There is lots of evidence that great goals align people in powerful ways. These are the strategic goals of an organization because they align, unify and serve to motivate the people in the organization’s ecosystem. It is easy to observe that organizations that thrive in the long run have these strategic goals figured out and built into the fabric of their cultures. They also, in turn, derive a healthy profit that allows them to reinvest in the future.
STRATEGIC FLOW
Organizational strategy is made up of a crystal clear vision (Outputs) and the motivation (Inputs) of an organization that is aligned, confident, and committed to strive toward the execution of that vision. This combination of a firm’s strategic inputs and outputs determine the “why” an organization exists. When you couple those with some clear and meaningful metrics, you have a winning strategy. If were to represent an organization’s strategy in a linear swim lane, it would look like the diagram above. Successful organizations take strategic income, generally in the form of inspired intent from the people in their ecosystem, maximize their motivation in the context of the organization, and make meaningful progress toward its strategic goals. When the vision is succinct and motivating, it provides for clarity in what needs to tactically get done to optimize both the number of people investing in the future of our organization, our advocates, and the intensity of their investment.
Sometimes your strategic inputs get disrupted by outside events or forces and it becomes necessary to pivot the vision to survive. Neither of these factors is static in nature, they are constantly changing and being tested. A useful way to look at strategy is as the combination of these two variables. Thus, a definition for strategy might look like this:
An organization’s strategy is the combination of a clear, powerful vision and a team of people that has the motivation to execute it.
STRATEGIC MATH
If either of these components is ineffective, the inputs (motivation) or the outputs (vision,) you do not have an effective strategy. Both components are required to create an environment that produces most anything of value. Additionally, leaders will always be working to maximize both components. They are critical parts of the infinite game of business. If you had an objective measure of the effectiveness and efficiency of each component, it would look like this:
This formula provides a powerful lens through which to look at the symptoms of function and/or dysfunction in your strategy. I use multiplication because if either component is zero, it zeroes out your strategy. It provides powerful language for leaders to explain their strategy and to better diagnose troubles and understand where to prioritize their effort. You need to have both to achieve any modicum of success with a team. Without a strong vision and a motivated team to achieve that vision, you do not have much of a strategy. For example, you may believe that you have a clear and executable vision, but if you are unable to get anyone else motivated to agree with you, where are you going? The alternative may also be true: You may have a group of people that appears to be signed up to achieve your vision, maybe because you are paying them, but if your vision doesn’t connect them to a positive and meaningful result, the outcomes that you achieve will be less powerful, less efficient and definitely less creative than they could be.
Let’s break down the components, as we did for tactics.
STRATEGIC OUTPUT: VISION
It is a prerequisite for ongoing success to have a clear and stimulating picture of the future that the organization wants to create. There is always more to learn in the context of a vision, and more clarity can always be achieved. The more dynamic your market conditions, the more important it is to continue to improve that clarity. While clarity is difficult to measure, the disarray is palpable when it is poor. When a team experiences a lack of vision, because they lack clarity around who they are serving or what problems they are solving, it manifests as confusion. A “vision” is a painted picture of the future for your team, that allows them to apply their passion when they are living into it. It allows them to push through boundaries, overcome obstacles, and come up with innovative ways to achieve their strategic goals together. Great visions includes a crystal clear understanding of whom the organization is serving, what problems it is solving for those people, and how it is measuring strategic success.
The more knowledge a team has about where they are heading and what success looks like, the more success will become available to the team and the more they will be able to celebrate it. Sun Tzu is instructive about our need to maximize the “knowledge” that we have about our environment as an essential part of our strategy. Without a clear vision, confusion results and it is difficult to maximize any results. I have written about clarifying the dominance hierarchies in your ecosystem and establishing a clear vision to maximize success elsewhere in more depth if you want to read more deeply about creating great visions.
STRATEGIC INPUT: MOTIVATION
In most knowledge and service-based organizations today, the largest cost item on the financial statements is likely to be labor. Even if labor is not the largest cost item, as, in some commodity businesses, the motivation of the labor force is undoubtedly the most strategic input. If your organization relies on patents as strategic inputs, it is the creativity, knowledge, and intelligence that are put toward the application of those patents that are the true strategic advantage. Motivation is the wellspring of creativity, making the motivation of the people in the organization a key strategic input.
Sun Tzu also talks extensively about our need to make sure that the souls being led are motivated. He makes the fundamental need for motivation, as a part of your strategy clear. To optimize your strategy, make sure your team is aligned, confident, and committed to achieving the vision. When the motivation of a team is weak, it manifests as resistance or apathy. When this condition persists for an extended period in a business, it may manifest as burnout. Motivation is complicated.
If your organization relies on the creativity of its people, it pays to understand the mechanics of intrinsic motivation. I’ve written a fair amount on it here on Medium, and the scientific literature is bursting with knowledge about how it works. It is a leader's responsibility to understand these mechanics in order to create an environment where creativity and innovation thrive.
“He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks”
— Sun Tzu
THE MOMENTUM FRAMEWORK
Putting these two swimlanes, the tactical and the strategic, together gives us a very clear visual understanding of how organizations can set themselves up to thrive for a very long time. This will help your leadership team to organize, see and instrument the four key leadership activities required to produce momentum. I call this The Momentum Framework:
The income and outcomes columns are what we are looking to maximize from outside of our organization. Inside of our organization, the four levers of Vision, Motivation, Capability, and Execution, give leaders a clear way to organize their thinking and to prioritize their activities. All leadership activities and initiatives can be mapped on this chart. It provides a complete and holistic view of leading a team or an organization. On the horizontal axis, from left to right, we organize our activities and priorities from our income to our outcomes. On the vertical axis, from the bottom to the top, we organize our activities and priorities from the tactical to the strategic. Culture underlies the framework, as it serves as the glue that allows teams to bring their strategy to life through their daily execution of tactics. An organization’s culture is what turns the strategy into the tactics through conversations, cooperation, coordination, and shared commitment. It is the shared language, context, mantras, stories, and art that serve as the foundation for those conversations that get things done in your organization. Chalmer’s Brothers writes extensively in this domain in Language and the Pursuit of Leadership Excellence.
With this framework, you can instrument and diagnose where your weak spots may be. It gives leaders a useful lens through which to determine where they should be focusing their leadership energy and allows them to set their organizational priorities to maximize future momentum. The framework has proven useful as well by allowing leaders to zoom into the product team level and it can also be used to zoom out at the organizational level to focus a leadership team. A key to leading successful teams is to separate your strategy from your tactics so that you can be more purposeful about each and how they interact with each other. Take it a step further to distinguish your income, inputs, outputs, and outcomes clearly so that you can maximize your odds of success and more rapidly diagnose disfunction.
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REFERENCES:
Lackoff & Johnson (2003) Metaphors We Live By
George Box (1987) Prediction Corrected Visual Predictive Checks for Diagnosing Nonlinear Mixed-Effects Models
Tzu, Sun (500 BC) The Art of War | Note: I cannot find that precise quote in any of the translations of the book I have read. The second quote is adapted by me from the book.
Taylor, Frederick (1911) The Principles of Scientific Management
Freidman, Milton (1962) Capitalism and Freedom
Goldratt, Eliyahou (1984) The Goal
Flaherty, Sean (2019) KPI’s That Inspire
Flaherty, Sean (2021) Confidence and Competence, Emerge, Journal of Business Agility Vol.1 / Issue 3 Aug/Sep 2021
Flaherty, Sean (2020) The Nature of Competition
Flaherty, Sean (2020) Unleashing Creativity and Innovation
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (2008) Flow
Flaherty, Sean (2020) Remixing the SWOT Analysis
Sapolsky, Robert (2004) Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers
Jensen, Michael C. (2001) Foundations of Organizational Strategy
Porter, Michael (1998) Competitive Strategy
Flaherty, Sean (2020) Building an Inspired Culture
Frankl, VIktor (1946) Man’s Search for Meaning
Flaherty, Sean (2020) Measuring Relationships
Deci, Ed and Ryan, Richard (2017) Self-Determination Theory
Flaherty, Sean (2021) Trying to Serve Everyone Gets Us In Trouble
Flaherty, Sean (2021) Great Visions Unlock Human Potential
Flaherty, Sean (2020) The Leadership Flip
Brothers, Chalmers (2018) Language and the Pursuit of Leadership Excellence
Flaherty, Sean (2016) Momentum
