What is strategy?

According to LinkedIn, there are 1,100,000 people with the word "Strategist" in their profile. We've worked with quite a few of them, and we've found that they produce a dizzying array of ideas, all too frequently taking the form of a forty-page PowerPoint document with a name like "Brand Definition Model". If you've ever read such a document and wondered, "Is this the strategy? What slide is the strategy on?", then this is the article for you.

We're going to spend the next 700 words defining "strategy," giving you a few examples, and talking about how to craft a good one. We'll also look at a few other definitions, and talk about why we think ours is more useful.

Defining Strategy

An excellent place to start is the free encyclopedia:

Wiki: a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty

We put it a little more simply:

A strategy is
a flexible plan
to meet a goal.

This definition is useful because it is general enough to encompass many of the ideas you likely associate with strategy, but gives them clarity and focus. At the end of the day, it’s not about agreeing on an idea, it’s about meeting a goal.

It also hints at why the role of the strategist can be so vast: defining a goal, gathering the information needed to form a plan, and undertaking the vast social enterprise of persuading others to follow that plan, are all part and parcel of creating and implementing a strategy.

Example: driving strategy

An arena where almost all of us follow the same exact strategy is driving a car. You might not think of this as a place for strategy, because it’s (usually) not a competitive space, but it’s a context totally shaped by a common goal, and a common approach to meeting that goal.

When we're driving, we want to get where we're going quickly, which also means safely. And there's a single plan that shapes how we do that: we try to act predictably.

We can articulate that strategy is, "Reach our destination quickly and safely, by acting predictably". Or, we might just focus on the plan: "Act predictably."

Almost every aspect of driving is shaped by this goal and plan to meet it. Speed limits keep us moving at a similar pace; turn signals help those around us predict what we'll do next; signs, signals, and road markings help us predict how others will act, and help others predict what we'll do, too. And because we all act predictably, we can safely move at much higher speeds, helping us all get where we’re going faster.

This is the epitome of an effective strategy: accomplishing multiple goals, by providing a flexible plan applicable in almost every situation, all in a clear and memorable package.

Example: Tortoise brand strategy

Our branding goal, like most branding goals, is pretty generic: to stand out from our competitors in the eyes of like-minded peers and clients.

Our plan is the unique part. To stand out, we want to build a reputation for three attributes that are uncommon among creative agencies: precision, patience, and tenacity.

The action-oriented articulation of this strategy is: "Be precise, patient, and tenacious."

This strategy underpinned our naming process, where we picked Tortoise, a creature with a legendary reputation for patience and tenacity, and which is also the subject of a ubiquitous fable we can easily reference to challenge negative conceptions about the value of our attributes. This strategy has shaped our approach to communications, where we aim to demonstrate precision by creating in-depth articles that clearly explain complex concepts like strategy and branding, which few of our competitors have had the patience or tenacity to truly digest. It's shaped our tone of voice, where we try to avoid jargon and buzzwords.

Both "act predictably" and "be precise, patient, and tenacious" are flexible plans to meet their respective goals. They are simple and straightforward distillations of countless other plans and actions, useful for almost any decision—and that's why they work.

Building a strategy

If you're in need of a strategy, that means you have a goal you don't quite know how to meet, or you have a plan that isn't flexible enough to guide all those involved in meeting it.

The place to start is clearly articulating your goal. This can be a little tricky, because there are usually countless goals at every level of granularity. We recommend taking your highest-level goal—which, let's be honest, is almost certainly "Increase profitability—-and take it one step down. How will YOUR product or practice do that?

Once you've established your goal, it's time to create a general plan. In branding, we recommend starting with the words "Build a reputation for...". There are many ways to answer this question, but we recommend gathering a lot of data to populate a positioning chart.

As a check to make sure you've done it right, you want to test for flexibility. Is this big enough that everyone I want to influence could make sense of it? This is part of why we recommend the "Build a reputation for..." formulation: almost anyone at your company can see how their own actions might impact the company’s reputation, and they can use this tool to make their own decisions without you having to make those decisions for them.

Lastly, you might find that you do need a more granular strategy for a specific group or activity within your company, such as naming, writing, design, or UX. We recommend you go through this process again, treating the "plan" part of your brand strategy as the goal of your naming, writing, etc. strategy. "To build our reputation, our writers will..."

With your flexible plan in hand, you’re ready to reshape your world.

Other definitions of “strategy”

Did you reach this article by googling "strategy definition"? Well, let's take a look at some of the definitions we found when we executed just such a search.

HBR: A business strategy is a set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making.

This is conceptually right, but it stops just short of the most important piece, which is having a clear goal. Why is this pattern of decision-making desired? Without a clear answer to that question, the "communicated and adopted" step will be quite challenging.

Forbes: A strategy is a framework for making decisions about how you will play the game of business.

There’s a lot to say about this, but let's focus on just one word: "Framework." At Tortoise, we are adamant that a framework is never a strategy, it is a tool to help you reach one or to justify it to others. In our experience, nobody understand how to actually use a framework to reshape their behavior. Clear, directive plans articulated in plain language will always achieve better results. To be blunt, focusing on a framework is the number-one reason that strategies fail to penetrate an organization.

Strategy.net: Strategy is everything required to reach the best results.

"Everything" is pretty broad, isn't it? If I'm going to reach the best results, I need mental focus, which is facilitated by proper nourishment. Is my team's diet part of my brand strategy? What about their sleep schedule? Joking aside, this definition, like many in the branding space, is so broad as to be useless: if a strategy could be anything, it might as well be nothing.

Kinds of strategy

For any human activity, there can be a strategy to guide it. We’ve got ideas about a few of them, including brand strategy, brand architecture, and naming strategy.