Strategy Check: Why Your Strategic Choices May Not Be Strategic at All

A strategy check to ensure you've made real strategic choices

How many hours has your leadership team spent discussing and debating strategy? And when you finally land on a few strategic priorities, how confident are you that smart trade-offs have actually been made?

As Strategic Advisors, we know the moment of truth in strategy development: aligning leaders to 3 or 4 must-win priorities. The final strategy—that clean, simple page —rarely reveals the hours of intense discussion and debate that went into landing those ‘big strategic bets.’

We know many Leadership Teams put in the hard work and yet still walk away without truly landing on a breakthrough strategy.

Why? Because they failed to make true strategic choices.

The Distinction That Separates Good Strategy from Bad

We can all point to a time where we laboured over making a major decision. The difficulty isn't deciding. What’s harder, is making a smart choice from a list of well-considered options.

The trick is identifying true strategic options – choices that move beyond operational imperatives or supporting infrastructure. Powerful strategy is the deliberate, sometimes painful commitment to an option that your competitors could also choose, but that you have consciously decided to own.

Roger Martin, author of Playing to Win, provides a simple test for identifying true strategic choices:

“Is the opposite of your choice stupid on its face?”

If the answer is 'Yes, the opposite is clearly stupid,' you haven't made a true strategic choice. If the answer is ‘no, the opposite isn’t stupid,’ you have landed on a strategic choice and left behind other viable, potentially profitable opportunities.

For instance, ‘Excellence in Customer Service’ isn’t really a strategic choice since ‘not bad customer service‘ isn’t a smart competitive decision. By contrast, a strategic choice would be to trade-off high touch customer service for unmatched value like an Ikea or Costco. Strategy is the discipline of saying ‘no’ to ideas with potential.

Trade-offs Made Personal

To bring this home, consider New Year resolutions. If your goal is to ’increase energy levels,’ you might land on a strategy of ‘eating better.’  The opposite of that is obviously ‘eating poorly.’

While ‘eating better’ IS clearly a worthy endeavour, it’s not a strategic choice since the opposite is an obvious non-starter. A more strategic approach would be to identify all the ways you could achieve increased energy, and then deliberately identify the one that represents your best chance of sustained success.

You might choose a ‘plant diverse’ diet while a friend with the same goals might choose the keto diet. Both choices have potential to increase energy levels so both have value, but you’ve made your choice, and it’s a true strategic one.

The Power of the Non-Stupid Opposite

Real strategic choices, the ones that create enduring competitive advantage, are decisions where the opposite is not stupid at all. In fact, your competitors may be doing those things and doing them successfully.

By making a choice, you are consciously saying ‘no' to possibilities that others are seizing. This hard ‘no’ is critical: it frees up the capital, talent, and focus to relentlessly over-invest in your chosen path.

The Challenge to Your Strategy

Look at your organization’s core strategic choices. If a major competitor were to adopt the exact opposite of your stated strategy tomorrow, would they sink their business?

If not, congratulations. You've done the grueling, necessary work of saying ‘yes' to some things and a conscious 'no' to others.

The best strategies look simple on the surface, but behind all that clarity and simplicity is a truckload of productive discussion, debate, and viable choices left behind.

Your Turn: Take a minute and write down your organization’s top strategic choices. Now write the opposite. If the opposite is an obvious non-starter, how can you refine your strategy to ensure the organization has made those tough strategic choices?