Writing Strategies and Visions. §
Highlights §
- A strategy is an approach to a challenge that recommends specific actions that address the challenge’s constraints. A structure that I’ve found extremely effective is described in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, and has three sections: diagnosis, policies and actions. (View Highlight)
- The diagnosis is a theory describing the challenge at hand. It calls out the factors and constraints that define the challenge, and at its core is a very thorough problem statement. (View Highlight)
- The second step is to identify policies that will be applied to address the challenge. These describe the general approach you’ll take, and are often tradeoffs between two competing goals. (View Highlight)
- your diagnosis, you get your actions. Folks are often comfortable with hard decisions in the abstract, but struggle to translate them into the specific steps to implement them (View Highlight)
- An effective vision helps folks think beyond the constraints of their local maxima, and lightly aligns progress without requiring tight centralized coordination. (View Highlight)
- Put all these pieces together, and you’ve crafted a document that is a guiding hand to align decisions while also creating room for teams to make their own choices and tradeoffs along the way. (View Highlight)