Don’t Confuse Strategy and Tactics
Mixing tactics and strategy guarantee you won’t make progress on either.
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On a regular basis I speak with a leader who is having trouble making a big decision. When we break down the problem, the discussion jumps between tactics and strategy constantly. The common refrain is: “We need to focus on the future, but this short term thing is also important”.
This framing of a problem makes the decision impossible. You cannot effectively choose between the details of a tactic and the impact of a strategy because they have almost nothing in common. It’s like asking which you prefer, Bananas or the color Blue?
Your business exists at many different levels at the same time. There is the work you are doing today (1), the work you are going to do tomorrow (2) and where you are headed in the coming years (3). These are all different contexts with their own considerations and needs. Whenever you are considering or discussing a decision, the first thing you need to do is establish which level you are working at for this decision!
Ask yourself:
Are we deciding whether to stop doing what we’re doing today?
Do we want to change what we’ll tackle next?
Do we want to shift our long-term, strategic goal?
For example, if you are looking at hiring another salesperson you might be worried about the short-term cash flow cost of paying them and the long-term risk of not having enough sales capacity to hit your targets. That's impossible framing because you’re weighing a short term tactic (immediate cash flow) against a long term strategic goal (sales target achievement).
Instead, you first need to decide what is more important: your short-term tactic or the long term strategy. Typically, the long term goal is more important so that becomes the decision: do we need to hire this sales person to hit our long term goal? If the answer is ‘yes’ then we make that decision, and then consider the short term cash flow decision separately. In essence, what was one impossible decision becomes two decisions:
Do we need another salesperson to hit our long-term goal?
If yes, how will we handle the short-term cash flow cost?
With this framing the decision is much more tractable. Instead of jumping back and forth between tactics and strategy, we broke it down into a strategic decision and a tactical decision! That’s the beauty of separating tactics and strategy, it gets easier to do both.
The Strategy Ladder
A framework I use to enforce this thinking is called The Strategy Ladder. Each rung of the strategy ladder is a different context for your business, and whenever you are dealing with a decision the first step is to establish which run of the ladder you are on.
I use a written document that summarizes the ladder, something that I can refer everyone on the team to at all times. Before a decision, you need to specify which rung of the ladder the decision exists which puts everyone involved in the right context. You can view the template I use and copy it for your own use here: