Daily Lab: What’s a strategy?

This is my 150th Daily Lab! If you’re enjoying these or finding them useful, would you send your favorite to a friend or colleague?

What counts as a strategy?

I define “strategy” as “the structure to work efficiently to get what you want.”

Which gives it three components:

1) What you want

2) Efficient actions to get there

3) Organizing structure

If you don’t know what you want—and what it would look like to get it—you won’t achieve it.

If you’re not efficient and acting sustainably, you’ll run out of resources before you get anywhere.

And if you don’t have an organizing structure to guide and constrain your actions, you’ll end up doing a little bit of everything instead of the few things that matter.

Strategies don’t have to be complicated—in fact, they should be simple.

Because if we can’t make our strategy simple, clear, and available to the people who need it, it means we’re unclear on what we want, how to get it, and/or how to structure our efforts.

But if we know what we want, the most efficient ways to achieve it, and how to organize our efforts for long-term, sustainable action, we have everything we need to get where we want to go.

If we don’t—we won’t.