Francis Wade, a strategic planning facilitator with 24 years of experience, argues that real strategy must be game-changing, not just maintenance. He's identified 25 common mistakes leaders make when pursuing bold, long-term moves, drawing from over 60 strategic retreats he's led.
We have a saying in my business that if it ain't game-changing, then it ain't strategy. It's just maintenance. All of us want to be connected to game-changing strategic planning to separate the Kodaks from the Fujis, the Blockbusters from the Netflixes, from the IBM PC computer divisions, from the Apples of the world. We want to be there when these things happen, when these decisions are made to go one way or the other, and we want to be known for and experienced making game-changing strategy happen right at the moment when decisions are made. But then you gotta wonder, why are there so many companies or clients that we are associated with and work with who want to stick to short-term thinking of just like 3 to 5, 4 and 5 years? And probably over time you realize is that there's a bunch of obstacles in the thinking of managers and executives over time. You've known or you've learned how to overcome some of them, but maybe not all. So you know what to say in circum— circum— circumstances, and especially the ones, the ones that are difficult are the ones where objections occur 2 or 3 or 4 or more all at the same time. The result is that you get stuck on a treadmill of low impact projects where you'd want to make a big difference. You can see that one wants to be made. But somewhere the obstacles are getting in the minds of the ones who need to make the decisions when they're putting together the strategy. Well, the good news is that I've thought about this problem for a long time. My name is Francis Wade, and I'm a veteran of over 60 game-changing strategic planning retreats over the last 24 years. And I sat down and decided to enumerate these obstacles and define them as like a list of distinctions or principles. And these are 25 mistakes in people's minds that they make when they consider a strategy that's particularly hairy or scary in scope. There's some major aspiration involved that makes them very nervous, and that kicks
off the 25 obstacles.
Ep 35 Your Strategic Stagnation Isn't a Framework Problem—It's a Story Problem
The YouTube Strategy School: Why Your MBA Didn’t Teach You Strategic Thinking
