Distinguishing good strategy from bad strategy

This is a work-in-progress draft!

One of the core challenges of evaluating strategy is that there’s an apparent inevitability to good strategy after the fact (of course it would work out), and an apparent cursedness to bad strategy afterwards (of course it was a bad idea), which obscure whether the strategy made sense in the moment it was created.

• believability is hard when history celebrates winners / senior leadership :-)

Discussion of distinguishing good versus bad strategy

This is an exploratory, draft chapter for a book on engineering strategy that I’m brainstorming in #eng-strategy-book. As such, some of the links go to other draft chapters, both published drafts and very early, unpublished drafts.

Quick tools

• Is it obvious how to get paid twice by both complying with strategy and doing product work?

Notes

• Quick refresher of Rumelt’s discussion on bad strategy

• Take the ideas of https://lethain.com/solving-the-engineering-strategy-crisis/ wrt bad strategy and how to evaluate/determine.

• Sounds bad:

  • What decisions have been made differently as a result?
  • Do people reference it, or even remember it?

• Much worse:

  • Makes hard for people to do work
  • Makes it harder to accomplish the same output

• Even if your strategy isn’t working well yet, just return to refinement phase. Many strategies don’t work initially or “go out of alignment” over time and need to be adjusted