What is Strategy

Every day, you are faced with numerous decisions and courses of action at home and at work. No matter what course of action or non-action you decide on, there is a price to pay. Sometimes it is an obvious decision, like:

Should I go to work in the morning?

Yes

Save your vacation/sick days for when you really need/want them
Prove yourself and earn a promotion
You’ll miss the office gossip
Your workload will pile up if you don’t go

No

I don’t want to deal with my annoying boss
I don’t like the tasks on my plate
Too much traffic
I’d rather go to the beach

If this is a one time thought, you might actually consider staying home. However, if this is an internal debate that you have regularly, you already know that if you want to be able to continue to pay rent, you need to keep your job.

Often, the decisions aren’t as clear cut:

How should I respond to an email?
Should I consider looking for a new job?
I think my manager made a poor decision. Should I do something about it, and what?
Should I tell my spouse about something that is really annoying me?

How do you make decisions and decide upon a course of action? More importantly, life is often like a choose your own adventure book. Tomorrow’s reality, as well as that of the future, will be based on the decisions made today. If you want to give yourself a high-level view of the decision as well as the potential or likely ramifications, you have to make use of strategy.

Strategy is often mistakenly thought of to be only relevant to business leaders and executives. However, this is not true. You can learn strategic methodology and apply it to any situation that you find yourself in. According to Wikipedia, strategy is defined as a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty.

In the upcoming articles, I am going to go through strategic concepts and show how:

it applies to you
you can use them in your everyday life
you can take advantage of them to improve your decision making abilities.

Comments

Open decision making

Group decisions used to be so easy to make. The leader of the group made a decision and everyone else listened. The leader may be a manager, a team lead or the alpha in a social group. Was that decision the best one for the group? Did it take everything into account? It didn’t really matter because people didn’t want to buck authority and face the ramifications. This fit very well into the strict hierarchical society that has been slowly eroding for the past 20 years. Recently, there has been more recognition of the value of collaborative decisions. Leaders started to understand that allowing group members to influence and participate does not lower their standing. Requesting feedback from people before finalizing a decision brings new perspectives, experience and ideas to the table. Just as importantly, it shows the people in your group that you care about what they think and respect their experience and knowledge. Gaining buy-in and ownership of a decision is hugely important today, ...

Strategy in your daily life

So how do we use strategy in our everyday life? It should be used whenever you want to achieve something to which there is no obvious answer. While the shortest path between two points is a straight line, it is often not practical or possible to follow it. There are factors and ramifications involved in the different methods and stages of getting from Point A to Point B. Strategy is understanding what is involved, weighing the pros and cons and consciously deciding the best method for you. As a very basic, practical example: You are standing on the corner of a busy street (A) and need to get to the bus stop on the corner diagonal from you. The bus that you need is going to turn left at the corner to get to the bus stop. You need to cross 2 streets to get to that bus stop. Do you first cross From A to B or from A to C? Most people don’t think about it - whichever light turns green first is the road they are going to cross. It is the same distance to the bus stop no matter which ...

Reward vs Risk

When developing a strategy, there are 2 opposing concepts that must be balanced - Risk and Reward. There are two known philosophies to take into account when determining the methodologies: “The best offense is a good defense”. “The best defense is a good offense” Understanding these 2 philosophies and when each is appropriate, is a key factor in determining a plan of action. Generally speaking, risk and reward are proportionate - the greater risk a person is willing to take (potential loss), the higher the potential for reward. For example, there are different bets you can make at a roulette wheel. If you have $1000 to gamble and pick a specific number to bet it on, you have the opportunity to win $35,000, whereas if you pick red/black you only have the opportunity of winning $1,000. In both cases, the odds are that you are going to lose, but the risk is much greater when choosing a specific number. When choosing an objective, you have to understand what you want to accompli...

Everyperson's strategy

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