Clear, Simple & Repeatable: A Strategy for Good Strategy
Knowing Self-Aware Leadership
Hello KSKOers
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about strategy. Well, I think it’s strategy….
It might be frameworks. Or maybe it’s structure. Or actually it could just be simplicity. Join me on my journey of making the complex, simple, the theoretical practical and the inaccessible, accessible.
Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!
Over the last few years I’ve been involved in articulating organisations’ objectives, aims, goals, missions and visions. Both facilitating others in the pursuit, as well as setting down my own. I love nothing more than gathering ideas and thematising them so that the bigger picture becomes clear, the pillars are accessible and the work streams are understood.
Moving from complexity to simplicity is a joy. And consolidating 100 conversations into 100 words, a pleasure.
On the one hand it’s an intellectual challenge and on the other it’s an accessibility essential.
Strategy is a Relationship
I had a brilliant conversation with Jeroen Kraaijenbrink in Episode 16 of The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast.
We talked about self-awareness, leadership and strategy and one thing he said has stuck with me: strategy only works if it’s a participative activity. Which means the language of strategy matters enormously.
If the conversations that built it weren’t genuinely participative, if people didn’t feel heard, if their ideas weren’t woven into something they recognise, then the strategy belongs to its authors. Not to the organisation. And if it belongs only to its authors, it will never travel far enough through the organisation and beyond, to do its job.
That’s the nub of it, really. Strategy has to travel. Through teams, through conversations, through the everyday decisions people make without even realising they’re making a strategic choice. And it can only travel if it’s simple enough to carry.
The Words We Give People
When you have few words to name your themes, people can associate with them. They can repeat them and they can connect with them. They are recognisable, promotable and, in the best sense, marketable. In moving organisations towards a goal, people need to hear them often. They should be consistently shared and transparently pursued. And they should be clear points of accountability.
This is where I think the writing dimension of strategy is undervalued. And I mean writing in the truest sense, not producing lengthy documents, quite the opposite. Finding the most precise, accessible, repeatable language for what an organisation is trying to do and why.
I’ve written before about the different voices we write in, academic, business, social, and how each serves a different purpose. Strategy sits at an interesting intersection of all three. It needs the rigour of clear thinking, the economy of good business writing, and just enough of the human voice to make people feel invited in rather than locked out.
I also came across the Flesch-Kincaid readability test a few years ago, when I was reviewing some public-facing materials my team had produced. It’s a tool that helps you check the accessibility of your written English, whether the person on the street who you’ve never met before could read it and understand it. If your strategy can’t pass the test, what chance does it have of landing with the people who are supposed to live it every day?
The question I ask when a strategy document lands in front of me is: could everyone in this organisation read this and know what they’re supposed to do differently tomorrow? If the answer is no, the work isn’t done yet.
Simplicity is the Work
Moving from complexity to clarity isn’t something that happens after the strategy work. It is the strategy work.
When people across an organisation can say the same few things about where they’re going, unprompted, in their own words, with genuine understanding, something really important has happened. The strategy has become shared. It’s moved from a plan into a practice.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when the development process is participative enough that the language belongs to everyone. And when the final articulation is simple enough that it travels, not just up and down the hierarchy, but sideways, outwards, and into the day-to-day business of the organisation.
I think about the leaders and organisations I’ve worked with over the years. The ones where strategy really landed were never the ones with the most sophisticated frameworks. They were the ones where people at every level could tell you, in plain language, what they were trying to do and why it mattered. To have achieved that is a big deal.
The Question Worth Considering
So, in thinking about your strategies, frameworks, plans and programmes, are they clear, simple, accessible and repeatable for everyone in your organisation? Not just the people who actually wrote the words down - but everyone.
If you’re not sure, go and ask someone who wasn’t in the room when it was written. What they say, and how confidently they say it, will tell you more about your strategy than the document ever will.
More to read…
Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk. She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as an Interim CEO in a homelessness charity.
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