Jermaine Edwards breaks down strategy into two core principles: navigation and core policy. He explains how strategy navigates, solves, and shapes work toward outcomes using Minimal Viable Resources, focusing on what advantage and resources you actually need.
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Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. If you're new, welcome. If you're old, welcome back to the fold. This is video number 3 of 4 in the Customer Mastery series, and we're talking about strategy today. However, there are 2 videos prior to this. Number 1 was around outcomes, number 2 was around goals. If you haven't seen those, go watch those first and then come back and join me to think and talk about strategy. Let's talk about strategy. Now, strategy, I can talk for days literally on this. I love talking about it. I love thinking about strategy and being strategic. It's what I'm paid to do all over the world. However, what I want to do today is to walk you through some really key ideas around strategy I think are underrepresented and not really talked about very much, particularly when we're asking customer leaders and teams to create strategies with their customers. We need to give them much more direction, a lot more clarity on what that actually means. So we're gonna look at two core principles and a few different ideas to help us understand those principles. So start with number 1, strategy is all about finding the right path. And so the first piece of this is around navigation. So strategy helps us to navigate through uncertain terrain. And this particular graph here is really a representation of what tends to happen when people are plotting their ideas onto a graph to try to get to a particular result. This is the actual path they want to take, but they're all over the place. So what we want to do is to find and navigate a path that gives us the clearest and straightest route towards achieving and gaining that specific outcome. And so if we talk about outcomes, we have to talk about the path in which we go. And the strategy is all about how we get there. The goals is about what we do while we're getting there, but actually the how is the strategy, and that's all about the navigation. The second piece is around solving. Now, strategy actually solves a really specific kind of problem. Now, if you looked at video number 1, I gave you a specific formula for thinking about how we get to outcomes. I said it's goals plus resources minus challenges over strategy. Now, strategy helps us to solve or to think about those challenges in a more proactive way, meaning that in order for us to navigate well, just like a sailor would down here, or a particular pilot or somebody captaining this specific ship, this person would need to be aware of those particular icebergs or things in the way to craft the navigation in a way to avoid those pitfalls. Strategy is just like that as well. It is designed to solve, to get around, or to overcome specific challenges so that you can get to your route with the least amount of cost, effort, and resource applied to getting that outcome. The next piece here is around shaping. Now, it helps to shape your thinking around how we actually do something. So for example, if one of your goals is to connect with a number of different customers throughout a particular time period, a strategy will help to shape how we do that. And it could be that you have a percentage of those interactions, engagements with customers that are automated, that are done via video, that done by face-to-face, that done through all different mediums that you have available to you. But the strategy based on what you're trying to achieve would determine and shape your thinking on how you actually go about doing that. So it navigates and helps to point you in the right direction, helps to solve specific challenges that might get in the way, and it shapes your thinking around the activities that you would need to do that are best in line with achieving that particular result. So now let's talk about the second principle, which is all about a core policy. And a core policy is there and designed to help you create things within constraints. And what can often happen is we can sometimes, when we come to trying to create a strategy, we can think in terms of ideal viable resources. I call those ideal viable resources. That's an IVR. Now, ideal viable resources can be really misleading, and oftentimes it puts unnecessary burdens on people trying to find the ideal resources to try to achieve something. Now, I'm not sure if you've ever watched the movie or the show MacGyver. Now, MacGyver was a particular former army person, somebody who was conscripted into the army and came out of the army, now was hired privately. And he was often in times in very difficult circumstances where all he had to escape a prison was like a hair clip and a screwdriver. And somehow he was able, with the resources that he had, to create a strategy to get out, defeat the bad guys, and win the day with very limited resources. Now oftentimes we take an ideal kind of viable resource perspective and we block ourselves from thinking about what I call minimal viable resources. Minimal Viable Resources. And Minimal Viable Resources is a way of us thinking about, hey, what do we actually need to get started? What do we actually need to get us to the first piece or the, the second area or to the third area? What are those specific resources that we need? What are the Minimal Viable Resources do we need to get started? And that allows you to move the boat forward, allows you to think about the constraints and get much more creative in creating the advantages that you want. So let's talk more about that. The first piece here I want to really bring to you is the whole idea of focus. The whole idea is focus. Now within the core idea of focus, what we want to do is actually say, what do we actually need to focus on? That helps us with this whole idea of minimal viable resources. What do we actually need to focus on? So once you've understood the navigation, what we're trying to solve, and It's shaping our thinking. What do we need to focus on directly that helps us to move the boat forward, that moves us closer to the result? The next piece here is around advantage. So does this strategy give us a— does it create an advantage for us to be able to achieve the result in a specific timeframe, with a specific amount of resource, with finances, with a number of people? What kind of constraints do you have? Does this strategy give us the advantage with the minimal viable resources, with the minimal viable resources to help us achieve that particular goal? What's the advantage it is creating for us? The next piece, final piece here is the actual resource. So once we actually know the focus point, the advantage, we now decide on, okay, this is the focus point, this is the advantage that we want to create, what is the actual resource that we need. We need to get really clear on that minimal viable resource. And then once we've applied it, we can now begin to create and shape our entire strategy. So now we have clear navigation, we know what we're trying to solve, we know the stinking that is allowing us to really take in our teams and for ourselves, we know the focus points, we know the advantage we wanted to create in order to solve these particular challenges, and we know the minimal viable resource that we need. This is a really important process for you to go through. If you're unaware of the things that your strategy is trying to solve, or at least remove out of the way to get you to that particular outcome, you're unlikely to get to the place that you want. In fact, while you're traveling down this route with your strategy, with your business, you'll get to an impasse. And if you're unclear about what you're trying to solve and about this clear navigation of what to focus on, you're likely to go to a dead end, and you won't know you're in a dead end. You'll think you're going in the right place, but actually what you're going is further and further away from your objectives. What you want is to get much clearer on those advantages, the focus points and resources, so you can move closer and faster to the outcome that you want. So we've gone through 3 specific videos of looking first at goals and we're looking at outcomes, and we're looking at strategy, we're looking at all these different areas. Now what we're going to do in video 4 is think about how we integrate all of these practices together into one formula so that we can get the outcomes that we want with our customers repeatedly and successfully.
