Constructive Debate and Action in Strategy Making

Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on strategy, featuring Jesper Sørensen’s insights on how to build a strategy for success and accept the inherent uncertainty of it all. This Stanford Graduate School of Business professor tells you what you need to know: from defining what a strategy is — and is not — to deciding who to involve and how to debate constructively. 

Every entrepreneur understands that their business needs a well-thought-out strategy to succeed. But the gap between knowing and doing can be daunting. Professor Sørensen, coauthor of Making Great Strategy: Arguing for Organizational Advantage, advocates for “starting at the end” by asking what it is you want to accomplish and what success looks like. “Then,” he explains, “you can start to say, okay, now here's all these things that we think might connect to what we want to accomplish.” 

While creating a strategy is a process that requires ongoing refinement, Sørensen reminds leaders to put their strategy into practice and learn along the way. What’s more, he cautions that successful execution depends on how well you communicate your strategy. He believes that everyone in your organization needs to understand the strategy and see themselves in it, because their work contributes directly to its success.

If you want to hear more on strategy from Jesper, check out our episode Strategy: It's the Big Bets that Matter.

8 Masterclass Takeaways 

A strategy is not a list of things you want to accomplish. “Essentially a strategy expresses the logic of success for the organization. How are we going to get the resources that we need in order to accomplish what it is we want to accomplish? You need to be able to articulate some sort of theory of how causes lead to consequences, how inputs lead to outputs, how actions lead to desired outcomes,” Sørensen explains.

Strategy is about managing uncertainty. “That's why you have to think about strategy as an argument, built on assumptions about how the uncertainty is going to resolve itself so you can accomplish your goals,” he says.

Your strategic argument needs to be logically valid. Sørensen says, “Look at whether the conclusion follows from the assumptions that have been stated. And what that requires you to do is to not say to yourself, that is a dumb assumption. For the sake of assessing validity, you just have to accept it to be true.”

Make sure all the right people are in the room. “Everybody at the organization who makes decisions and allocates resources needs to understand the strategy, so that their own actions can support it.”

How you debate matters. “The first thing you need to do is to create an environment where there is what we call psychological safety, where people feel free to dissent from the dominant opinion, and don't fear retribution,” he advises. He goes on, “Be careful about both verbal and nonverbal communication that shapes people's perception. No eye rolling. No shrugging.”

Avoid arguing blue. Sørensen explains, “It basically means yelling at each other and sticking to your position and trying to win. Instead, you want people to be focused on whether the argument itself is logically coherent. Even if you don't believe in the assumptions, if you did accept the assumptions, the conclusion would follow.”

Don't worry about it being perfect when you start. Sørensen encourages leaders to “go ahead and do the best you can and then take action. You're going to learn something. The data that's generated will shed light on your theory and then say, well, wait a second, I see that what we were assuming was that customers really cared about this, and that turns out to be wrong. So now how do I have to then adjust my behavior?”

Your strategy problems are not unique. “What's always striking to me is how everybody thinks that their problems are totally unique to them. I like to encourage people to see that there's comfort in knowing that actually, no, those problems are the same problems that everybody else has,” he says.

Listen to Sørensen’s insights, advice, and strategies for how to build your own strategy.

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