The one ingredient your strategy process needs
The game of strategy is a game of paradoxes.
On the one hand, you want a very tidy and clear end product. On the other, the way you get there is anything but that. But this is what makes it so fascinating to do, over and over again.
If it were too linear, we’d get bored, so we don’t look for linearity. A big part of strategy’s allure is exactly how messed up it is. Consider what Anne Lamott says about being a mess:
"Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared, and yet designed for joy. Those few people who aren’t a mess are probably good for about twenty minutes of dinner conversation.”
This is why the most interesting people tend to be quite messed up. And it’s what makes messed up creative jobs so captivating. Creativity never was a clean affair, but that’s not a bug; it’s a feature. So, to get to a good clean strategy, you gotta get messy along the way.
Of course, we need some stable ground, which is we should always:
Have clarity on the problem
Have flexibility on the solution
If you have that, then all the collective messiness that emerges is tolerable. More than tolerable: it even gets desirable, because now you’re on a quest. The mess that happens along the way stops being a bunch of dead ends. It becomes part of the twists and turns that help advance your story.
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