It’s easy to put your face to the grindstone. I’m not even talking about your nose – because people like us do everything we do ALL THE WAY. It’s easy to blaze forward dealing with things as they come, like protagonists in epic films fighting back all the evil enemies. That stuff is easy because you can always be busy at something. By the end of the day, you feel spent and it feels satisfying – until it doesn’t. Thinking often doesn’t have that same rush to it. But thinking is the thing that will allow your business to pivot, grow the way it needs to, and provide for your internal and external customers alike.
Strategic thought is one of the things that gets lost in the shuffle of business – and it’s not because it isn’t perceived as an important thing. Strategy is one of those things that is critical to the long-term health and effective execution of action in a business, but it doesn’t always have immediate tangible results. When you have a million things on fire, it can feel like the last thing you have time to do is think through the high level direction of the business.
However, strategic thinking is exactly the thing that can help you perceive potential fires before they’re lit. It saves you time and energy in the long run. It can also allow you to redirect things before they reach critical mass. Strategic thinking is how you identify where processes may support better business execution, the best approach to process implementation or improvement, and even the best way to engage process owners in dealing with processes that may not currently provide necessary results.
How can you bring strategy into your business? It isn’t just about setting aside time to think, although that is a great start! Here’s some questions to get you started:
- Where do I see instability in my business?
- Can the business infrastructure support more weight? If it breaks, how will it break?
- Where are there gaps in standard process that could produce more consistent results if addressed?
This is not the summation of strategic thought, but if you are looking for a place to start, these are great questions to ask. As you are looking at this, I find these simple definitions helpful to staying on track:
- Strategy: Planning for perceived change
- At its core, strategy assesses a current reality according to available information and makes a plan based on that information in relation to upcoming changes
- Process: Execution according to a strategy
- A process is a series of actions laid out to be the most effective and efficient according to a set of desired results (best identified through strategy)
Good luck!