Questions...and answers

An article in the 'Leading Strategy' series

In the previous Leading Strategy article, The Heart of the Matter, I wrote about how an organisation’s strategy work doesn’t have to set out to be comprehensive, radical or transformational: instead it needs to be focused on what matters strategically to the organisation at that time, what issues and opportunities will have most influence on its future, and to determine what it will do in response to these (and sometimes of course what transpires will be radical or transformational).

So, having determined the focus of the organisation’s strategy work at this particular time, how as a leader do you go about designing a process to address this? What strategy tools and techniques should you use - and where do they fit into the process? Will your Board colleagues start thinking about Strategy Awaydays or even 2 or 3 day Board Strategy Retreats (at a high-end venue with luxurious facilities of course!), involving various input presentations from across the organisation, followed by breakout groups, presenting back to colleagues on hastily-scribbled flipcharts, interspersed with plenary sessions to populate PESTEL analyses and develop a SWOT? Because isn’t this the way you always approach strategy?!

There’s often a bit of an anticlimax that follows these events: after the inevitable time-lag when someone tries to decipher the flipcharts and attempt to make sense of some of what has been written, then have the summary output document reviewed before being circulated, the content can be somewhat underwhelming, with anodyne statements and a feeling that there’s more to uncover, if only there were the time before the next strategy process deadline. Maybe too there’s a nagging doubt that there are issues that haven’t been addressed fully, aspects of the organisation’s situation that have been skated over rather than challenged with honesty (however painful or concerning)?

(Of course I’m being somewhat flippant - there are effective Strategy Workshops and well-articulated outputs that lead to the next stage of the strategy process - but several elements of the description above are not uncommon!)

So as an organisational leader wondering how to go about answering the issues and challenges that the organisation needs to address now, is there a more effective way than reverting to such traditional processes? Some way of ensuring the strategy discussions get to the heart of the matter, with depth and honesty?

Questions!

Questions are very powerful - and they drive the processes and conversations that lead to answers and decisions. Arguably, every step in developing a strategy can be defined as a question. (That’s a hypothesis I’d love to test - let me know if you can think of an exception!)

Questions - relevant and well-constructed - provide a focus for the organisation in its strategy work. Questions can be used at every stage to help stimulate and guide an organisation’s strategy work: appropriately framed, they provide the starting point for people to seek the information and insights to inform strategy discussions, and also the encouragement to probe and challenge (answering strategy questions with depth and objectivity is essential to develop real understanding).

The questions - and how they are framed - are for each organisation to work out: it’s what is relevant to them and what matters in their organisational context. Posing the right questions, mapping a path to answering them, and having the determination and confidence to seek robust and meaningful answers - this is at the core of developing organisational strategy.

The crucial point is that they need to be pinpoint in their focus and precise in their articulation - and therein lies the initial challenge. Framing the questions, understanding the context and articulating them with care, is an important skill in strategy work: questions define the challenge that people in the organisation then need to work together to answer. This applies at any level, from the fundamental ‘existential’ questions of why the organisation exists to what possible futures it should consider.

These questions are not pre-defined; they evolve as the organisation’s strategic thinking progresses. It is an iterative process, driven by the search for meaning, to fully understand something - put simply, the need to make sense of things. It is an exploration, a quest: a particular line of enquiry can prompt further questions, until sufficient understanding is achieved for what is required to be able to answer the question at the level that is relevant at this time.

It is not for those mapping the overall strategy process to specify how the questions should be tackled, but for the people directly involved in these. The appropriate process to work out the answers follows from the questions - as does what tools and techniques could be used to help. The art and skill of leadership in such a process is to create the environment, space and resources to enable such questions to be answered, and provide the stimulus, the encouragement and the challenge to enable people to work through this themselves: it is they who will then drive the quest for information, for insights, to develop and articulate answers that can help the organisation make sense of its situation, the options available to it, and hence determine and inform the decisions that need to be taken.

Of course, such a process can include workshops, ‘retreats’, ‘awaydays’ - they’re really just ways of having strategy conversations! The important point is how they are designed and structured - and considering them as a way of asking, refining or answering questions as part of a strategy process is more likely to lead to well-planned events that progress this. Questions provide focus, and a challenge plus the motivation to answer them: there is purpose in the conversations, in whatever format they occur.

Considering strategy work in this way, it becomes less of a daunting and complex challenge and more about a way of people in the organisation working together to come up with answers that lead to a shared understanding, and contribute to articulating a rational narrative across the organisation that it can use to steer towards its future.