Strategies
Per the usual night’s restlessness, I’m lost for words. I’m looking, not for inspiration, but for motivation. motivation to start and carry on my goal of writing weekly.
not because of some influencer or even lofty goal, but rather because I wanted this newsletter to be a sort of cathartic exercise for myself, as well as letting me practice writing down my thoughts and thinking about all the failures of my week.
I hope you’re drinking enough water, this weekend I got myself one of those 1/2 gallon water bottles, hopefully, I can achieve my random goal of drinking enough water.
this past week, I kept getting myself again and again into this topic of strategy and wondering how to “sell it” correctly
Strategy requires commitment to implement it.
— Dawn Ahukanna (@dawnahukanna) August 25, 2022
Means going over, under, around & through obstacles to achieve.
“Painless” or “no effort/discomfort” choice == quitting at first hurdle in 110 metre race, instead of carrying on regardless of clipping, knocking over or even falling. pic.twitter.com/ktKgawVLJ2
after reading the above tweet, I started thinking about why some of the past strategies had failed, given we as a group always come up with “strategies”, especially in the face of constant re-orgs.
I think some of the past failures can be attributed to not having enough time to even completely think through the strategy
or defining the “guarding rails” for teams to operate within. this proves harder for teams to execute, as well as difficult to make traction
we’ve had this “vision” to move away from certain end-of-life technologies, and we’ve spent years not doing a dent in the project
why? what we’re missing? are we not effective at prioritizing the work? are we not executing the most effective steps?
like, we’re doing tasks that we might consider under that umbrella or not doing tasks with the highest leverage?
but who’s in charge of providing ideas for the highest leverage tasks available? we might be missing a clear owner, and someone accountable for the success or failure of the program
In general, I think that both strategy definition and application are hard problems to solve within your organization
While I don’t have a solution to offer, I do recommend reading about it here, and here.
Happy Coding!
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