Spend more time on the problem

Spend more time on the problem: Einstein famously said if he had an hour to solve a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions. Yet too many companies do the opposite with strategy, racing through the “study the problem” stage and jumping straight into writing strategic plans.

Before your next strategy cycle, invest proper time understanding your operating environment and the customer, sectorial, competitive and societal problems you are trying to solve. Find the signal in the noise. Work out which trends genuinely warrant strategic response and which are just distractions, or merely commonly known facts. Distinguish between insights that will fundamentally reshape your sector and changes that will fade within a few quarters.

The quality of your strategic choices depends entirely on the quality of your environmental understanding. Rush the diagnosis, and you’ll build strategic solutions to the wrong problems, or at last poorly understood ones. As a CEO told me after we’d finished a decent deep dive session on environmental analysis: “Up until today, we’ve just been updating the same generic SWOT for years – no wonder our strategies haven’t been hitting the mark. These are new insights we can really leverage….it’s a whole re-think!”

Your action: In your next strategy session, allocate decent chunk of your time to understanding and thinking about the problem before diving into solutions.

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