How to get better at strategy?

strategy (37), eng-strategy-book (25)

This is a work-in-progress draft!

While working on this book, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’ve gotten better at strategy work over my career, and what advice I’d give to others who want to get better as well. Inescapably, I ultimately came to the realization that the best advice I can give about writing strategy is to write your own strategy document to solve the problem of getting better at writing strategy.

Toward that end, this chapter is advice for creating your own plan for getting better at strategy. In particular it covers:

  • TODO: fill in these topics
  • Exploring the topic of improving at strategy, especially what are the resources to learn from?
  • Diagnosing the strategies that you’ve seen work and not work, and in particular how your personal strategy has worked out.
  • Deciding on policies for improving at strategy,
  • Policies to deal with being too busy to do strategy
  • Policies for handling not being “allowed” to do strategy
  • Operating your strategy improvement policies: how do you make this happen?

Alright, let’s figure out how to write the ultimate strategy: your strategy for getting better at doing 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 As such, some of the links go to other draft chapters, both published drafts and very early, unpublished drafts.

Exploring strategy creation

One of the reasons I started work on this book is that I felt the lack of publicly available examples was slowing the industry’s overall pace of improving at engineering strategy. This particularly impacts the exploration phase of getting better at strategy, where there’s simply not enough work to learn from others’ experience.

Nonetheless, resources do exist, and we’ll discuss the three categories that I’ve found most useful:

  1. Public resources on, and adjacent to, engineering strategy
  2. Finding private and undocumented strategies through your network
  3. Building a learning circle of strategy practioners who learn together

Each of these is explored in its own section below.

Public resources

Reading between the lines

Public strategies are often misleading, as discussed previously in evaluating strategies.

TODO: write

Finding real engineering strategies

Publicly-shared engineering strategies are hard to find, a major reason I embarked on writing this book. Some that I’ve found over the years are …

TODO: some references to resources appendix

It’s much easier to find strategies in private, both internal to your company and through conversation with peers at other companies.

The most useful mechanisms I’ve found are:

  • peers’ stories – strategies are often oral histories
  • internal archaeologists – talk to the longest tenured members of your org who collect the org’s stories

internal strategies

Externally these are surprisngly rare, which is a major reason why I decided to write this book.

  • Read strategies as widely as you can.

    Internally, you often can find the strategies, although they often aren’t written down!

  • Talk to your peers across companies

Fostering working communities

  • Put together a working community, e.g. a monthly learning circle

Pull notes from:

Diagnosing your prior and current strategy work

  • which strategies have you seen that worked or didn’t work?
  • for those that have succeeded, how long did it take to recognize they were working?
  • for those that failed, where did they fail in the strategy creation phase? for example, it might appear that they failed in policy, but was that because they policy was based on a poor diagnosis, because the policy didn’t solve its stated diagnosis, because operation of the policy was poor, or something else?
  • do you currently have problems that would benefit from strategy?
  • are you able to write strategy? why not?
  • evaluate misses/errors across phases: e.g. maybe your diagnosis was flawed
  • was the failure preventable? how to prevent next one?
  • learn from successes: how did they structure approach to diagnosis and exploration? operation?
  • which sorts of companies do strategy? why or why not? are you sure the ones not doing strategy aren’t doing it? (maybe they are and you just can’t perceive the strategy work)

Policy for improving at strategy

  • just do more, lol
  • spend time going broad and deep, but not only deep

Too busy for strategy

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What if you’re not allowed to do strategy?

Write them anyway, just know you can’t implement them. You can share them with senior folks as draft thinking and see if your writing influences their thinking.

Sort of a https://lethain.com/model-document-share/ variation

Operating your strategy improvement policies

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Summary

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