Series 3: Reasons Not to Use Strategy

Many of you know that I am a big proponent and advocate for strategy because it is the tool for building a better, sustainable community. But they may not be a good investment in certain circumstances. Strategy is an expensive endeavor, not just because of the resources associated with key actions but also because of people’s time and attention, particularly for the leadership and elected officials. There are times when the cost of strategy outweighs its benefits. In addition, while a successful strategy can make a difference in the community, a not-so-successful strategy (such as the ones not reaching their potential) can also leave people exhausted, frustrated and possibly angry. This article is dedicated to those moments when feeling strategy is expensive and is not-so-successful. 

Why am I writing this article?

If strategy is the tool for building a better, sustainable community, why am I asking for limiting its use? As public servants, we are proud of our work and we want to build our communities. The motivation drives actions. In many cases, we act on community issues, poor press, political fallout or changes from other orders of government. We may jump on developing a strategy, without understanding if the strategy is the right tool and/or the associated key success factors. The underlying assumption is that the earlier we start addressing the issue, the sooner the community could be better off and the sooner we could build (or restore) trust and demonstrate accountability. But poorly conceived strategy would not only not help with the issue but also would cause other issues – unproductive routine between elected officials and administration, a bad tone for culture and staff burnout, or what is worse – staff disengagement.

The work of public strategy includes a series of activities: scanning the environment, setting the vision and goals, and formulating the strategy. Scanning involves a broad range of people both within and outside of an organization to understand what is occurring in the environment. Setting goals requires elected officials and leadership’s direction and the input from the frontline. To identify key actions, you have to engage subject matter experts. So, for strategists to be successful in their roles, they have to have excellent communication, coordination and time management skills¹ – in short, great people skills. But what is often not emphasized enough and maybe sometimes overlooked is the technical and subject matter expertise of strategists: what to look for in the broader environment, what makes an implementation-friendly direction and how to leverage the process to engage and build culture, and how to facilitate and identify outcome based measures while showing the line of sight to our work. There is generally a lack of understanding and recognition of strategists as a profession and the value-add. 

According to a recent survey done by Deloitte Center for Government Insights², trust scores for governments are lower amongst respondents than scores for all commercial industries in the survey. From the COVID-19 misinformation to more calls for equity, there is a heightened expectation for transparency and accountability. The trend toward using strategy to address many of the issues is mostly positive, but the push to demonstrate transparency and accountability has contributed to a rise of not-so-successful strategy. For example, there are organizations that think of strategy as a collection of mission and vision statements and a set of values and that’s it, with no measure, no key action, and no budget consideration. There are also organizations that use strategy as a way to justify existing work and that think of strategy as mainly developed by facilitation.

What is behind the issues is the overuse of the term strategy. Given its origin³ and activities, it is quite understandable of the perception that strategy is a sign of leadership and the expectations that leaders are supposed to know strategy and use it to manage organizations and issues. But strategy has its definition. My personal favorite – strategy is a choice about the broad approach an organization is going to take toward executing its mission and, in doing so, achieving its vision. It is actionable, intentional and results-oriented. Understanding this term matters a great deal. Because only then you would pay attention to those questions whether you sponsor, develop or approve a strategy:

• How are we going to implement our strategy (actionable)? 
• what community outcomes are we expecting (intentional)? and 
• how do we know we actually made a difference (results-oriented)?

So what I hope to do through this article is to demystify strategy and promote proper strategy literacy. Generally speaking, there are two circumstances you may want to avoid or pause from developing a strategy: first, strategy is not the right tool and second, the organization isn’t ready.

1. Strategy is not the right tool

So, what are the “right” problems for strategy to undertake? To answer this question, first let’s go over two concepts: VUCA is a term to cover the various dimensions of a changing environment (or the context of the issue). It is an acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Volatility speaks to the changes that are frequent, rapid and significant . Uncertainty is about the lack of predictability as a result events and outcomes are not known. Complexity involves a multiplicity of issues and factors, some of which may be intricately interconnected. Ambiguity is manifested in a lack of clarity and the difficulty of understanding what the situation is. The second term is sphere of Influence⁴ which speaks to the organization’s ability to deliver desired results: 

• When an organization is in control, it can make direct decisions and acting alone is possible.
• When an organization is at the Influence level, the organization has shared responsibility and action is possible in collaboration with others.
• Concern – it is about delivering the desired results involves a wide range of issues so having a clear understanding would be step one.

Now let’s bring the two concepts together. There isn’t an absolute standard or measure for VUCA. It depends on your analysis, perception, risk appetite and tolerance. For simplicity, let’s just broadly categorize as high, medium and low.

Chart 1 – When Strategy Works Best?

Start with control on the right. In a low VUCA environment, the environment and the conditions of the issue are predictable, clear and understandable as a result direct actions through an organizational program⁵ would be the best way to address the issue; in a medium VUCA environment, we start to see variations in the environment and the issues. Due to the varying conditions, leverage policy⁶ in terms of the principles of actions would be the best course of action; of course in a high VUCA environment, depending on the stake of the issues, the organization can either choose to do nothing or act quickly by entering in a state of emergency to stabilize the situation in the short term. A good example would be how we dealt with the pandemic at the very beginning.

Concern is where the organization has the least influence on the issue. Basically, it is a question of if the organization should be involved directly in this space or not. In the public sector, advocacy will be the best course of action regardless of the situation but the organization can also choose to do nothing in a high VUCA environment.

Now let’s take a look at influence, here the organization has shared responsibility and action is possible in collaboration with others. In a low VUCA environment, the environment and the conditions of the issue are predictable, clear and understandable but because of the limited influence, the organization can either choose to partner with others to increase the organization’s influence, act alone to address part of the issue or do both.

In a medium VUCA environment this is where strategy works best in the sense that it takes time and effort to understand the environment and the issue and then identify the role of the organization and the best course of action; again due to limited influence, the course of actions will need to involve others. In a high VUCA environment, understanding the environment, the evolving nature of issues and also bringing the organization together will be critical and it takes time but the organization can also choose to do nothing if the effort much overweighs the benefits.

The implication of the aforementioned theory is that understanding the external environment and where the organization is going to position in the context of the issue matters a lot in terms of addressing the issue. Inappropriately choosing strategy over policy or program means it could be a costly solution. Inappropriately choosing strategy over emergency management or advocacy means it may not produce the expected results. This is why it is important to leverage an evidence-based approach to initiate your strategy. I have already explained it in my previous article – Reasoning While Imagining⁷, so I am not repeating myself here.

1. Organization isn’t ready

Elected officials set the direction while administration follows and makes things happen. It is the setting we all know for years and it works! The varied role between elected officials and administration works well for policy and programs. But not so well for strategy. There are a couple reasons we just can’t take the ball and run with it for strategy. There is a need for intentional, ongoing and evolving development of the organization. 

• Organization lacks understanding and skills

Knowledge and motivation is one of the four factors that define public strategy⁸. It is about staff who don’t necessarily have the required understanding and skills to do what they are expected to do. When an organization lacks strategy and performance literacy, there would be a decreased understanding of the importance of strategy work that is to elevate community outcomes, instead strategy could be seen as “just another project from the top”. When staff treat strategy as operational work (just another project), they focus on individual or department perception and performance, rather than community outcomes; they focus on getting things done, rather than doing the right things; and they focus on showing alignment rather on making an impact. It can also lead to poor measurement, unreliable data and ambiguous reporting; consequently poor information for decision-making. 

Based on the research conducted by the National Center for Public Performance at the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University-Newark for a network of U.S. professionals in public organizations in 2014⁹, lack of experience and knowledge is one of the three main barriers for sustainable performance management systems which are essential for implementing strategy. ICMA’s Certificates in Performance Management has a long history recognizing staff training and support as an effective way of implementing strategies and sustaining performance management effort. But it is not just the measurement and data collection that require training. Evaluation, decision-making, scanning and strategy literacy in general can also benefit from training and development. It takes time and effort to develop organizational competencies in all of the aforementioned skill areas. 

• Organization lacks resources

If your goal is to develop a strategy and have it implemented, then contemplating and including a resourcing plan during the strategy development process would help you go a long way. It is a critical component of public strategy because it helps outline the required financial and human resources (at least at a high level). If the budget implication is not considered, elected officials and the public may be surprised by the proposed tax increase, as a result the long term fiscal sustainability would be questionable and what is worse is that the key actions may be delayed or cancelled, as a result the associated community outcomes would be compromised.

Based on the research done by Bert George and Richard Walker¹⁰, “practitioners should

not expect relevant strategic plans to emerge from ill-funded strategic planning processes”. If there isn’t much interest to raise taxes or effective means to reallocate funds from within, this may suggest a need to rethink what the goals are or if the organization can actually make a difference.

So what could we do in the face of financial constraint? There are a couple options for your consideration: First, stay ahead. Leverage a scanning process to monitor the environment and identify opportunities and challenges in advance. It is also an effective way to initiate your strategy. Second, build an agile organization. Much of what we have accomplished during COVID would have been considered impossible. But we made it. How we pivot and reallocate matters a lot. Third, make your budget work for you, not the other way around. Much of our work and process are centered around budget. Approving a budget is one of the most important decisions any council gets to make. In many places, the discussion is very much focused on the incremental piece which is easy to explain and understand. But in my opinion, the incremental budgeting exercise sabotages employee morale and kills innovation as it encourages status quo thinking. My earlier article: What You May Not Know About Strategy¹¹ talked about how to leverage strategy to consider what not to do.

• Organization lacks commitments of key decision makers

According to James Clawson and his book, Level Three Leadership, there are three levels of human activities. Level I is about observable behaviors, level two is about conscious thoughts while level three is about values and belief. Well, in plain language we can think of it as what we often mean as body, mind and heart. 

Chart 2 – Organizational Examples of Level Three Leadership

To lead effectively, level one leaders learn new ideas from various sources: research, industrial magazine or subject matter experts. They implement them without considering how it affects the behaviours in the organization. They are not being intentional. Level two leaders take conscious thoughts. They are mindful and make intentional changes. So you tend to see different types of organizational changes that are purposeful. This is what is known as the talk. Level three leaders recognize and create a set of values and expectations that the people in the organization should behave, which is also known as organizational culture or values. More importantly, they are consistent – walk the talk. 

The intricacy in developing and implementing strategy in the public sector requires work in collaboration and leading without power or authority. So when we talk about the commitments, conscious thoughts and intentions alone would not be enough. Leaders must believe the strategy and act upon the values identified in the strategy. 

Specifically, the commitment can be manifested in four behaviours: 

• First, it is about being a visible champion of strategy: providing necessary resources and support and removing any obstacles that could put the strategy at risk. 
• Second, being a spokesperson actively communicates your personal understanding and commitments to others in the organization and even outside your organization. It also means you seek opportunities to collaborate, to support, and to enable by focusing on shared outcomes. 
• Third, being holistic. Whether you are a councillor or a department manager, by nature you represent your own district or are responsible for your department. But you also make decisions that affect the entire community or organization. Being holistic means wearing two hats, and knowing which one is the right one at the right moment. You can only truly commit to the strategy by taking on the holistic perspective. 
• Lastly, being disciplined. Having the courage to say “Yes” to projects, services or programs that are unpopular; and say “No” to projects, services or programs that are inconsistent with the directions of strategy. The core of this behaviour is to continue to ask the question: how does this work contribute to our strategy?

In fact, our organizations will never be completely ready. It would not make sense to wait when duty calls. We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do. The questions are if we treated each strategy as the project of the year, the quarter or the month; and if we leveraged the opportunity to strengthen organizational maturity. Rome was not built in a day. 

There are a couple of things that could be helpful: create a dedicated position (or team) that is responsible for facilitating the work. It helps get things done, retain corporate knowledge and gather staff support. Second, leverage a strategy maturity model. It helps capture where the organization is at in the spectrum and can also be a roadmap for next steps and further development. Third, leverage orientation. A good orientation with organizational and elected leaders can not only share the necessary community and organizational context, but also introduce the “help” that is needed from them so commitments could be secured. Last but not the least, value conversations and learning over the process. Getting the strategy developed and approved timely is important. What is equally important is to leverage the same process to converse, to learn, to share and to build partnerships and relationships all of which are key to bringing the strategy to life.

Summary

Our work is never easy. Using strategy adds another layer of complexity to it. According to the Association for Strategic Planning, more than half of the strategies are not reaching their potential. But when used properly, strategy can make a difference. According to Bert George and Richard Walker, public strategy “has a positive, moderate, and significant impact on organizational performance” and “should be part of the standard managerial approaches in contemporary organizations.”

The purpose of this article is not to discourage or dissuade from using strategy. In fact, it argues for the conditions of using strategy properly to address issues or seize opportunities because only actionable, intentional and results-oriented strategy can make a difference in the community that we care the most and our own.  

1. For more information, please read “The Evolving Role of Strategists,” Kel Wang, PM magazine, June 2021, https://icma.org/articles/pm-magazine/evolving-role-strategists.
2. Source: Deloitte Trust in Government Survey, March 2021.
3. For more information, please read “Strategy Management: An Evolving Discipline,” Kel Wang, PM magazine, November 2020
4. Source: City of Sydney, Australia ’s spheres of influence
5. A program is a series of actions conducted in a certain order or manner. It is often known as day-to-day operations or services.
6. A policy is a principle of action adopted or proposed by an organization. Elected officials play an essential role in policy-making providing direction for program and administration. The staff or administration plays an essential role in programs or operations.
7. For more information, please read “Reasoning While Imagining,” Kel Wang, PM magazine, April 2022.
8. For more information please read “What Is Different About Strategy In The Public Sector And Why You Should Know?” Kel Wang, PM magazine, November 2021.
9. Source: Obstacles and opportunities for sustaining performance management systems by Marc Holzer and others, 2017.
10. Source: Does Strategic Planning Improve Organizational Performance? A Meta-Analysis, Public Administration Review, Vol. 79, Iss. 6, pp. 810–819.
11. PM magazine, April 2021