{"id":2179,"date":"2016-02-11T02:19:17","date_gmt":"2016-02-11T02:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=2179"},"modified":"2016-02-11T02:19:17","modified_gmt":"2016-02-11T02:19:17","slug":"theres-no-f-in-strategy-and-usually-doesnt-need-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=2179","title":{"rendered":"There’s no F in Strategy (and usually doesn’t need to be)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while ago I read a little article whilst doing a management course that was very influential on me (I’ll find the reference and add it here soon). It argued that the process of building a team—in the strict sense a group of people who could really work closely and robustly together on a complex problem—was difficult, time-consuming and emotionally fraught, and that actually, for most business processes, there isn’t really any need to build a team<\/em> as such. Instead, just a decently managed group of people with a well-defined goal was all that was needed for most activities. Indeed, this goes further; because of the stress and strain needed to build a well-functioning team in the strong sense of the word, it is really unproductive to do this, and risks fomenting a “team-building fatigue” in people.<\/p>\n

I’m wondering if the same is true for the idea of strategy. Strategy is a really important idea in organisations, and the idea of strategic change is really important when a real transformation needs to be made. But, I worry that the constant demands to produce “strategies” of all sorts, at all levels of organisations, runs the danger of causing “strategy fatigue” too. We have to produce School strategies, Faculty strategies, University strategies, all divided un-neatly into research, undergraduate, and postgraduate, and then personal research Strategies, and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all strategies. Really, we ought to be keeping the word and concepts around “strategy” for when it really matters; describing some pissant objective to increase the proportion of one category of students from 14.1% to 15% isn’t a strategy, it’s almost a rounding error. We really need to retain the term—and the activity—for when it really matters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while ago I read a little article whilst doing a management course that was very influential on me (I’ll find the reference and add it here soon). It argued that the process of building a team—in the strict sense a group of people who could really work closely and robustly together on a complex […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[14,42,63,60],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2179"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2180,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2179\/revisions\/2180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}