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 ...

Searching for a new job

Looking for a new position can be a very frustrating process. You have the right education and experience for the position you are interested in. You go to a job board or two and send in your resume to a number of positions that you feel qualified for and - nothing. Sometimes you get a rejection notice, sometimes they tell you that if you’re a match they will be in touch, and sometimes you don’t hear anything. How can you use strategy to better your odds? The first thing to understand is that job boards are often filled with posts by placement agencies. Placement agencies often enter fake jobs in order to get your resume into their files. So not every job that you see listed is an actual current opportunity. Placement agencies also are generally unfamiliar with the specific technologies that the hiring company is looking for. Because of this, they are looking for very specific key words and if there isn’t a direct match, they won’t forward it on even if you have experience with t...

Everyperson's strategy

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