Welcome to part four in a five part series on creating clarity and systems from a coaching point of view that add value to your life. And this video specifically focuses on strategy, which has one of my favorite etymologies. It comes from the ancient Greek word strategos, which means to arrange.
And the idea where it came from is that strategy is how a general arranged forces on a field. That metaphor, it extends to us and the ideas behind how we arrange our own resources against an opponent and why that is going to work. So in this video, we will cover what strategy really means, the three most common missed opportunities and how to use a very simple tool called the strategy triangle.
So let’s dive in. What is strategy? Strategy is essentially your hypothesis or theory of why the work you’re is successful. It’s your clearest theory for why your actions and systems that you have will achieve the mission you set out for yourself.
So I like to think of it this way. The mission is the purpose of your action. It’s what you’re doing in the present moment.
And strategy is why that action is going to work. And planning is how you allocate your resources based on that strategy. So strategy is not a to-do list.
It’s not a project plan. It’s not just about logistics. It’s the coherent idea behind why your decisions and actions are going to work.
And especially when resources are tight and uncertainty is high, strategy becomes all that much more important. Now, without a clear strategy, your actions risk becoming scattered. And with it, the decisions, they start to become a little more reactive rather than proactive, and it doesn’t have that guiding principle.
So let’s talk about the three most common missed opportunities when it comes to strategy. The first is planning without first determining your strategy. Now, people often jump straight into the planning stage.
I remember when I first started my life coaching practice, I didn’t really know what to do. I was stuck in that space of there’s so many things I know I should be doing, but I’m not really sure what I need, what needs to happen first. And so a lot of times people will jump into launching offers, writing content, setting goals, without first really getting clear on, well, what’s the best idea I have for why this is going to work? So instead, the useful thing here is to pause, get clear on your strategy, which you first had to do that work of getting clear on your mission, do the work and getting clear at the vision, getting clear on the values that you have, that you hold dear in your life.
And then when you look at strategy, the questions to ask are, why do I think this will work? And what else has to be true for this idea or for this project to also work? When you start asking those kinds of questions, those why questions, it starts to add a little bit more understanding. You start to get clearer on, now, what are all the other assumptions that I’m making? And then you can start to look at those assumptions individually. And this is essentially what strategic thinking means, is looking at the reason why you think something is going to work, and then all the other assumptions that go along with it.
And this then leads to the second missed opportunity, which is changing strategies or changing processes or systems without testing them. And one of the biggest missed opportunities is making too many changes at once without a clear feedback loop. For instance, if you shift your audience, your message, your tools, your website, the colors, the buttons, all at the same time, it becomes nearly impossible to know what’s actually working and what’s not.
And so strategy, it does require some degree of stability, and it also requires testing. You can ask yourself, what’s the best way to test if this is going to work or not? And so when you’re looking in this space, you want to try to go through as quickly as possible this feedback loop to test something and to see what’s working before you really scale it and make it something that you do on a long-term basis. The third missed opportunity is not knowing when to stop changing.
Once you find a strategy that works, keep it. This is something I’ve struggled with a lot in building this, like coach training EDU, building an organization. There was always this time period when I wanted to try out so many different ideas to see what worked and what didn’t, but there is a hidden trap in always wanting to innovate and feeling like I constantly needed to improve or evolve every single piece of the system.
It’s simply a missed opportunity. Everything does not need to change. In fact, some of the most successful strategies, the ones that I did not even know were working, those were the ones that I wanted to change, and that just didn’t work.
And so the brilliance, the brilliancy in this is knowing what to improve and what to leave alone. And having a strategy that you will only change one thing at a time or that you will change something once, maybe twice, and if it, you know, if it doesn’t improve, you bring it back to it. You know, a strategy can help you understand and see the difference between what’s working and what’s not and what you really need to change and what you just need to leave alone.
My guideline on this is if I try to change something three times and after three times it doesn’t improve or make better, it is what it is, I leave it alone and look for something else to change or shift. And this is where, you know, you can really start putting strategy into, you know, action. You even have a strategy of how you’re going to innovate.
This is where things really start to work. And this leads to part, next part in this, which is putting the strategy triangle into action. There’s a really simple framework that I use.
And the first is, you know, just draw a triangle. And the first thing is the objective. What are you trying to achieve? The second point of the triangle is the approach.
What’s the method or the structure you’re testing? And the last part is the measurement. Well, how are we going to track progress? How are we going to gather feedback? My team and I, we recently made a change to one of the scheduling buttons on our lead generation form. And we thought that this change was, of course, it looked better.
It looked just, you know, more smooth. Of course, this is going to be an upgrade. But when we made the change, our lead rate generation from that page, it dropped by 80 percent.
We were getting 10 inquiries a day from it, and now it got two. That is a scary number as an organization. And had we made, you know, three or four other changes at the same time, I would have checked every other of those three or four changes before we even looked at that improved form.
And so looking at that, having this idea of, we’re going to make this one change and only this one change right now and measure how it’s going to happen, it saved our organization from that trap of, I don’t know, two, three, four weeks, months, figuring it out. If we ever would have figured it out, that is a really scary thing to look at. And so when you start to apply this idea of, all right, I’m making this change and how can I track it? How can I measure it? You start to have more awareness of the strategies that are really going to work and why they’re working.
This strategy triangle, it can be the difference between making it or not. And the key here is to connect all three points through that strategic idea. And it’s not about complexity.
It’s about coherence. It’s about aligning a strategy with your mission, with your vision, with your values, and then testing, testing the idea and seeing if it’s working or not. And if you want feedback, if you want to test this thing, I recommend you visit coachtheory.com. It is a coach client matching app.
You can have a coaching session on demand and you work out the different strategies, the ideas you have based on this video, and I invite you to stay connected. And thank you for watching. Thank you for engaging this material.
Thank you for the subscribes, the likes and the comments. I really appreciate it. And I hope to see you soon with some more content.
Thank you.
