I’m busy writing about Strategic User Experience and I could really use your help.
Right now I’m looking for two things in particular:
- the dark side: examples of things that are commonly called ‘our strategy’ but are not really strategy at all.
I think there are plenty of these out there. Some examples:
1. I’m often shown things that are called ‘our strategy’ but are usually a list of tasks in groups, like, say  ‘Our Social Media Strategy’ with a list of things we’re going to do (make a facebook app, make a twitter widget, etc.)
2. Another one I often see is an incredibly vague product description something like, ‘we’re doing social mapping’ – again this is not a strategy.Do you have some other examples of things that are currently misconstrued as strategy?
- the bright side: good ways to keep strategy alive (known, understood, attended to) in an organisation – communicating strategy
These examples, I fear, may be a little more scarce, but I’d love your help to try to uncover as many good examples as possible. What have you seen/made/used to help an organisation maintain it’s focus on it’s purpose/strategy/mission? (where that purpose/strategy/mission is a real one and not just a marketing soundbite).This could be some kind of physical thing, an activity, a tattoo (just kidding… I think) – whatever works to help make sure that people in the organisation know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, who they’re doing it for.
I’d really appreciate your help compiling two sets of examples and, of course I’ll happily share them back with you here (wherever/however possible, taking commercial sensitivity into account of course).
Add yours to the comments below or email me.
tough one – wouldn’t strategy always be context specific?
like as a footballing metaphor – say, barcelona plays a possession game, they keep the ball – they are always going to keep the ball against their opponents. that is their methodology.
however, against particular opposition, they might choose to try and get the ball to a specific player to expose a weakness in their opponent – or capitalize on some other idiosyncracy.
Strategy can change in response to the environment – I totally agree with that. If your competitors change then you may also need to change your strategy in response. I don’t think that means that you can’t have a real strategy (or strategies, perhaps, if you’re a football team or similar) or that you can’t communicate it properly tho’, do you?
The hard thing about strategy is making it broad enough not to constrain the solution, but specific enough to be meaningful.
The most effective projects I’ve done have been focused on a single metric, although I’m not sure that counts as a strategy. Perhaps it’s necessary to have a clear goal before you can have an effective strategy.