The Sunday Mail
The past is gone, but it carries important lessons that are important to ignore. The present is here and it has too much that needs to be understood and contextualised. The future is approaching and galloping furiously that it must be faced with strategy. Facing the past without a strategy is a waste of time, opportunity, potential and resources. Do not fear, face whatever stands on the way. Create quality spaces to reflect on your strategy and see where you are and where you wish to go.
Reflecting on the context within is important, sobering and clarifying. With clarity comes fluent action.
Present challenges can be absorbing and blinding. The experiences of the past can be debilitating and draining. Both are never an excuse to be without a strategy. Never park where adversity met you and do not allow yourself to waste time thinking like a victim, acting like an alien and working with timidity. Clear and bold strategic action moves you forward. It is when things are toughest that you must plan for the future and mark your pathway towards great destinations. Whatever challenges you face, do not give up on the future and stop believing in greatness. Frame your context with strategic eyes, hyper-awareness of change and grounded understanding of issues.
Strategic conversations help build your models of greatness achieved, shaping your map to the future and clarifying the real jobs to be done. You have to have a bold and exciting vision of the future if you are to have a great one. Strategy conversations for strategy formulation are your attempt at developing a play-book to translate vision into an agenda for action. If you do nothing and plan nothing the result will be lost opportunity. If you act with brute force and fury but without clear thought the result will be wasted energy. If you just act without thinking deeply often results in thoughtless action. Strategy conversation that clarify thought and motivate action result in purposeful action. Purposeful action is economic and effective.
Avoid confusion
Do not let big words and high sounding ideas tempt you to lose the plot and be confused. In any strategy journey you always meet models, high sounding words and fancy concepts that you are used. Some are simple, others are misapplied and others are complicated. Do not fear taking a chance at strategy and do not be confused by the many concepts. Keep the objective clear and the fog will lift. In strategy you want to know where you are going, where you are and how you will be there.
At its core then strategy is a game plan, a way to play and a way with focus and take action in order to get to where you wish to go. Strategy helps you to play to win and not just to play. It is about ploughing through challenges and gaining the advantage you need to move towards your priorities and goals. Strategy is a game-play that helps you define you goals with clarity, the means you will use to get there and to address the obstacles that stand in your way. When you have a plan the obstacles become stepping stones. Strategy conversations are more than just an event and they should never be a mere and meaningless ritual.
Challenge traps
To start any strategy pathing it is important to look clearly at the circumstances around you, the context in which you play and your case. It is important to be able to locate with clarity the challenges you face. Challenge denial is a stage where you deny that there is any challenge that you are facing.
If you do not have a problem or at least feel you do not have a problem you cannot be helped easily. Denial results in strategic delays.
Another nagging challenge is the hidden challenge. Hidden challenges have a nasty habit of later coming out at inconvenient times and in unscheduled times. The best way to deal with any challenge is to face and name it for what it is. Strategy conversations allow you to see your reality in perspective. This is where a good facilitator is helpful and necessary.
Strategy ponderables
A strategy meeting or conversation is not just a discussion of the day to day activities that you do. It is important to look closely at the “ponderables”. These are the important issues that you wish to really give focused thinking and conversation time. A cue to the ponderable is to ask: “what keeps you awake at night?” Ponderables are the big issues that you face. You may not have ready answers but the mere process of asking important questions starts the change journey. The ponderables that you face help a facilitator to know how to structure the conversations for the strategy conversation session to be useful.
Picture greatness
The starting point of any important strategy conversation is to be clear about the picture of greatness that you are pursuing. This picture should rise above your excuses and your current handcuffs. If you do not know what you want anything will be good enough and any road will be a good road.
The clearer your end state, the easier it is to plot a path towards it.
Elephants in the room
There are many things that could be looked at in a strategy conversation session. The worst sessions that I have seen are “PowerPoint” beauty parades where the main focus is how attractive the slides are, without a clear focus on the real heartfelt issues and discussions of substance. Good strategy conversations start with looking at the elephants in the room. These are big issues that everyone knows about, but that are uncomfortable to raise or discuss. Unless the elephant in the room is tackled the strategy conversations becomes a mere annual or periodic ritual. The elephants in the room cannot be tackled in private by just one or two people. This is because the elephants in the room, take different form depending on the observer. When looked at by different eyes in the team, the elephant tends to mutate. It is only when these views are shared and discussed that it becomes easier to skin the elephant. Strategy conversations then should not be shouting matches but listening opportunities to hear and validate the differing views.
The handcuffs
Having a desire, a passion and articulating a goal is not enough. It is also important to look at the handcuffs that you currently face. Handcuffs are issues that are holding “hostage”. By looking closely at them you can evolve the steps you need to move forward. The journey of a thousand miles always starts with the first few determined steps. The first step may be finding the small keys to unlock the handcuffs. At times it may be finding the person with the key. Whatever holds you back toward will not be there forever.
New lenses
Strategy conversations help you see clearly the forces that are at play inside and outside your situation. Eyes that look are common but eyes that see are rare. Perhaps the best result of strategy conversations is that they help you not to fear chaos but to thrive on chaos. Chaos is an opportunity. Turbulence brings new possibilities.
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 his website is: www.miltonkamwendo.com
