Iterative Strategy Development

A strategy that can't be wrong can't teach you anything. Treat every strategy as a hypothesis and run experiments until the data tells you to scale or pivot.

Iterative strategy development treats every strategy as a hypothesis, not a committed project.

We typically start with Richard Rumelt’s strategic kernel: diagnose the challenge, define a guiding policy, and specify coherent actions. Then you run the following cycle on repeat:

1. Select a strategic bet,
2. define the Behaviors you expect to change,
3. choose Measures that would confirm the change is working, and
4. Refine and Repeat based on what you learn.

If the measures don’t move, the strategy was wrong and you adjust. If they move in unexpected ways, your diagnosis was incomplete and you update it.

This approach fights a few, common strategy failures.

The first is “set it and forget it,” where a leadership team locks strategy during an annual offsite and doesn’t revisit it until next year.

The second is strategy-as-aspiration, where the strategy is really just a list of goals with no mechanism for learning whether the approach is working. By building explicit feedback loops into the strategy itself, you get something closer to a scientific method applied to organizational change. Literally, treat your strategy as a hypothesis and only when it proves out, then you consider scaling.

Lastly, many leaders have made huge bets on strategy. Hole up in a room with top tier consultants, produce a 100+ slide deck, and deploy the strategy. This failure mode courts a significant amount of risk and separates the “thinkers” from the “doers,” in what Peter M. Senge called the heads vs. hands problem, which in turn severs a critical feedback loop that tells you if your strategy is working.

Our Change Initiative Frame captures each iteration’s current state: vision, boundaries, strategies, success measures, and the people involved. As with all framing, this living document and the events around it serve as a means of capturing learning, measures, vision, community, and more.

Resources

• Richard Rumelt, “Good Strategy Bad Strategy” (Crown Business, 2011)
• Peter M. Senge, “The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization” (Crown Business, 2006)
• Change Initiative Frame — the canvas that captures each strategy iteration
• Change Vision & Strategy — workshop where this approach is practiced
• Wardley Mapping — maps the strategic landscape that informs each iteration