Experiencing “strategy” from within

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
Winston Churchill

For a variety of reasons I have been thinking quite a lot lately about strategy.

At the risk of stating the totally obvious it seems to me that one thing we often do is focus too much on getting the strategy absolutely right. We therefore tend to treat strategy as a statement of an ideal towards which we are striving rather than a process we are engaged in. The result is that we, therefore, don’t focus enough on the things that put that strategy in context: intention, implementation and results.

It strikes me that because we generally think about each of these things in a separated way we don’t get the benefit that comes from experiencing them as process. We also have a powerful tendency to think and talk as if we can look at strategy from the outside. To somehow treat it as if it is an object we can hold in our hands, turn over and examine. My growing sense is that from the moment we begin to ask questions about where to go and what to do next we are in the midst of process and can only experience that process from within, as one of many “actors”. When we do experience strategy from within what we seem better able to do is adjust our own actions as we go based on our sense of how we anticipate others will respond, what they actually do and what sense we make of that.

For me this could lead to a quite different way of approaching the activities we usually name as strategising. Instead of establishing “the strategy” and then focusing our efforts on trying to get our own actions and those of others around us to conform to the requirements of the strategy we would, instead, be paying close attention to the interplay and shifts among our intention, our ideas about how to achieve that intention, what we actually do and the results we get. It seems to me that this would facilitate a more adaptive, responsive and emergent approach to getting to where we want to go that reduces the risk that we end up somewhere near where we intended but not where we actually needed to be.

I would be interested to know if this is anything like the way you experience strategy?