The Sunday Mail
Milton Kamwendo
Motivation for Success
It is not enough to just look at what is happening and be overwhelmed by complexity and despair. For you to be great you need to see what is happening now and in the unfolding future. When you do not see the future you set up yourself for many surprises. Strategy is a game plan for winning in this battle ground and the unfolding one.
To see strategically, you need to use your hindsight for sense-making, get insights through intelligent mapping of information and what you see.
Then using your foresight to see the alternative futures and choose a way to play that allows you to win. With that, you are able to strategically position yourself for greatness. The game of life is too important for you to enter into the field of play blindly using hope as your compass.
It is easier to understand strategy when you boil it down to its fundamental questions. The first and essential task of strategy is self-assessment. Self assessment allows you to evaluate yourself, what you are doing, why you are doing it and what you must do to improve performance and go to the next level. Peter Drucker, the management legend, challenges any organisation to ask the five essential questions, namely:
◆ What is our mission?
◆ Who is our customer?
◆ What does the customer value?
◆ What are our results?
◆ What is our plan?
These questions have enduring significance. Unless you can confront these questions honestly, you lose focus, push papers instead of work; and you just threaten to do great things and yet never do anything.
Strategy forces you to have a clear plan that allows you to focus on your reason for existence, use your capabilities, demonstrate accountability and achieve results that matter. Strategy is about results and delivery not just tools and reports. It is about seeing what matters most and doing what matters.
Problems will always be there in any environment. Limitations will always pop up in your path. Naysayers will always sing along as you give your motivational musings. Stumble blocks will always be thrown in your path. Delays will always come here and there.
There is nothing strange about difficulties and challenges. Never glorify or worship your problems and predicaments. They are not an exceptional discovery.
Strategy is about plotting winning paths, and prosecuting winning initiatives despite all the odds staked against you. If it is all easy, does not require you to think, require resource or take you out of your comfort zone, it is likely not strategic. It should just be part of your daily management routines.
Thinking and seeing strategically allows you to see through the maze and mess. It helps you see what to do despite the despair, disconnects, discontinuities or danger. Strategy allows you to locate opportunity in adversity, advantage in despair and to see pathways where there are discontinuities, setting you on a path towards greatness.
Strategic seeing allows you to have a critical look at yourself. To evaluate your strengths, situation, stakeholders and starting points. Seeing strategically allows you to analyse your opportunity, assess your risks, see the open spaces you can enter and the options that you have. Strategy informs your yes and no decisions. Part of strategy is being clear of your offer and what you will turn down and the doors you choose not to enter.
Seeing strategically helps you to elevate your view beyond the every day, allowing you to lift your sights beyond the clouds. You start looking beyond the turbulence of your own environment. Seeing strategically allows you to ask big, bold inspiring questions that challenge your assumptions and logic about how things work and how they should work. Strategy is about creating platforms of greatness despite the inviting excuses you could easily adopt.
Through hindsight you see the emerging patterns, paths that you have followed and the trail you have taken. Things that happened intuitively need to be understood and modelled. Smart choices you made need to be noted. Ways in which you improvised need to be looked at. How you dribbled past limitations needs to be understood. You innovate best when you make sense of what you have done, and what you are doing to keep standing. Strategy reflection allows you to see the game that you have been playing and note your style, goals and method of play.
Seeing the larger picture and context allows you to locate what you are doing within a larger context. You have to zoom out to see the larger context, the inviting horizons and the long term view. Never think that your problems are a global trend or that your village is the centre of all that is happening in the world.
Take a wider and broader view. It may mean talking to people that see what you do not see. It may mean having to have someone who sees differently. Facilitate conversations that broaden your thinking and perspective. Whatever it takes, zoom out and broaden your thinking, then zoom in to take a closer look.
Seeing strategically means that you have to zoom in to have a gradual view of your situation and internal context. You have to understand what you are talented in, and your place of power. You have to look at both your visible and invisible balance sheet. The visible balance sheet is what you know and can easily record. Tools for analysing balance sheets are known or you just need a little effort to master these.
The invisible balance sheet of assets and liabilities cannot be easily reduced into numbers, but that does not mean that it is not valuable and that it does not influence the numbers. Invisible assets include things like special know-how, relationships, networks, ecosystems, brand power, history, faith and many other things. Take time to look closely and you will see things that you have been looking at that you may have never seen in the same light. You are richer than you may ever know, more powerful than you think, and more capable than you imagine.
How then do you improve your strategic insights? Look at the data and the trends. Make sense of the data and what it is telling you. Sometimes, what you feel and what the data is saying may be different. Facts do not lie and they may not say what is comfortable.
Next get other perspectives to enrich your view of your space, of the category you play in. Sometimes it is broadening to hear the voice of the customers, the partners and others you work with. Regrettably, they may surprise you when they tell you what you did not expect. Whatever increases your self-awareness, and unveils your blindspots will always improve you.
Get a view of the competitive space. Who else is playing in the arena and how do they play? How are they positioned? Is there a report on the play field and how you measure? Seeing the whole field could broaden your perspectives and the state of play. You do not have to play the game others are playing, but you have to look at the log standings as well.
Get a good facilitator to work with. A facilitator is not just a master of ceremony for your strategy planning event. A good facilitator is a lot more. A good facilitator will help raise questions that increase your self-awareness, broaden your vision and challenge your faith. A good facilitator will help tap all the voices in the team. Self-facilitation has the risk of amplifying your personal echo and then calling it a choir.
Seeing strategically will allow you to play to win and not just to play. In playing to win, you have to have a clear picture of success and what that means. That picture becomes a strategic asset if it is shared and owned by the team. Seeing strategically allows you to clearly define where you will play and how you will win. It allows you to play to your strengths, managing what matters. Seeing strategically allows you to think through the strategy course and maze. A strategy does not guarantee that you will win, but it increases the winning odds. Even if the environment changes, a good plan helps you to have an idea of what to change and do differently. What you see determines what you do. What you strategically see determines that strategy game that you will play and it’s depth. As you see, so shall you navigate.
Committed to your greatness.
◆ Milton Kamwendo is a leading international transformational and motivational speaker, author, and growth mentor. He is a cutting-edge strategy, team-building and organisation development facilitator and consultant. His life purpose is to inspire and promote greatness. He can be reached at: [email protected] and Twitter: @MiltonKamwendo. His website is: www.miltonkamwendo.com.
