Strategy for Life

Most people have not created a strategy for life. It is easy to live day after day, doing things you have always done without a plan. It is time for you to create your plan. The majority of this text follows Rich Horwath´s book ”Strategy for you”. The key difference is that this strategy focuses on systems.

Lets begin from the end. Do this step alone. It is crucial to not let anyone affect it. Imagine your state of being after you have executed your strategy. Define what you want to be in terms of the four key components: mind, body, spirit, and relationships. Ask: ”What do they mean to you?” Think about your values related to these terms. For example, if you value freedom, the state of being signifies to be free. If you value health, the state of being is to be healthy, etc. Think about what your ideal life will look after you have achieved these states. Do not hold back. It is not a time to think about your chances to get the life you want. Reality checks will come later. The purpose is to start from the fundamentals.

If you cannot define what you want in terms of your values, think about the past. It is the best indicator in your deepest desires of the future state of being. What excited you then? Who was involved? After you have thought about the past, ask: ”What are things that feel great today regarding body, mind, spirit, and relationships?” If you do not know, keep a notebook or smartphone with you all the time. Write things that feel great. Eventually, you can notice and define your wanted states of being. These states are part of your strategic intent.

The next step is to define uniqueness. Find out the special understanding, skills, and personality traits you have. The best way to do this is to ask others. Ask friends and seek professional help if you can. Your ego is the worst enemy to discover why you are special. Therefore, you are not the best judge of uniqueness. Ask about the past and the present. Do the former if someone has known you for decades. Ask about your body, mind, spirit, and relationships. Ask what are different about them? Can others define your distinct style to express yourself? Your uniqueness has two components. You can have a special style to express similar actions as others or you can have special actions.

Resource allocation

It is time to focus on your resources. Lets get back to the four key components and think about the resources you allocate to them. They include time, talent, and financial assets. I will focus on time now. Once you have used it, you will never get it back. Time allocation is one of the most important tasks. If you have never found out how much time you use in a week for each action, it is time to do it.

Measure categories like sleep, work, exercise, learning, commute, relationships and parenting, spirituality, eating or preparing meals, other chores, TV, radio, and social media. There are 168 hours in the week. Finding out 150+ hours of them is enough. If you had a minute-by-minute schedule, you wasted lots of time. You could not say ”no” well enough. The highest odds are causes related to work. Modern knowledge workers are the prime examples.

Think about your major systems related to the four components and resources. Do you have any? It is likely that you have them but have not thought of them as systems. Think about their structures in terms of goals, feedback loops, interactions, etc. Anything from one to five main systems in each category is a reasonable number. Systems can interconnect many categories. Finally, think about how your major systems support the state of being you want to achieve. For example, if you want to be free, think about the systems that create your income streams. Single stream is not enough, unless you have enough money to last for decades.

SWOT analysis

A good source for the principles of SWOT-analysis is Albert Humphrey´s article in businessballs.com. Strengths and weaknesses are internal abilities. Opportunities and threats are external situations. The first two describe something you have and the second two are about future situations. Together they form a useful model to design a strategy. I prefer potential edges instead of strengths. Edges are the unique combinations of your talents. They create faster learning and higher peak potential. Weaknesses bring constraints. They complicate and slow chances to go where you want to be. Opportunities are beneficial and can help you increase odds to reach the wanted states of being. Threats have the potential to reduce odds to reach the wanted states.

You can have control over internal abilities. They include resources, understanding, internal systems, relationships, values, etc. Make shortlists of the edges with the highest potential and greatest weaknesses. Be concise, specific, and focus on causes, not results. For example, my live interactions with others are poor because I am shy.

You can influence opportunities and threats, but not control them. They include the actions of others, the supply and demand of your skills, economic situations, technological changes, etc. Quantify the odds of future situations and their expected payoffs when you list your opportunities and threats. Do not be specific. Use ranges. Think about the possible impact they have in reaching your states of being. Choose the ones with the largest effects. Deal with them in strategy. Use discovered uniqueness, resource allocation, and SWOT-analysis to create strategic visions for each component of life before you design your strategy.

Design and execution

After creating strategic visions, design strategies in terms of four key components of life. Define the current state, what you want to become, objectives, allocated resources, and vision to each strategy. Involve all stakeholders in each step. Without their approval, it is impossible to design strategies you can execute.

Start from the smallest difference between the desired result and the current situation to design the first strategy. It requires the least effort and has the highest odds of success. It creates inertia and helps you to move forward. Start from it and finish with the strategy that requires the hardest effort. Do not forget the time frames. They take years to execute. A complete change in some state of being can take up to ten years.

Objectives are a big part of the design. They focus on systems and their structures. This perspective is important because visions change. What you want today might change in a few years. Great systems can work with different states of being. The first objectives you design are crucial. Focus on new and simple systems with short time frames. Objectives with the longest time frames and highest complexity become later. After designing the first objectives, make a what-to-change list. Think about whether you have to add resources to the items in the second. A not-to have-list becomes last. It has all systems and system structures that create obstacles to execute strategies.

Each design must have a vision, current and desired states, resource allocation, objectives in the executing order, what-to-change and not-to-have lists, and time frames for execution. Most parts change during the execution. Time frames have the highest odds of change. Most people are too optimistic about them. The longer the frames and the more complex the objectives, the larger the changes. No strategy survives the whole execution. Be flexible, willing to eliminate, and change parts of the strategy when you have to.

Do not hide strategies from senses. They are hard to execute without availability. Execution also requires tactics. They are specific instructions on how you implement strategies. They are beyond this text.

Strategy

Definitions

Strategy has so many definitions you could write a book about them. Here are couple of them: ”A plan of action designed to achieve a long term or overall aim.” or ”A general plan or set of plans intended to achieve something over a long period of time.”

Strategy for individuals

I focus on strategy for individuals in this text. Strategy is applied in many organisations. Military strategy, business strategy, and corporate strategy are the most common applications. You can create a strategy for life or for some aspect of life. For example, you can create an investment strategy or a strategy for being the best you can be. You can create a set of principles that you use to guide your actions, thought processes, and decision-making to achieve a long term aim. These principles are your framework. Do not confuse strategy and tactics. Strategy is a common framework for achieving what you want. Tactics are the individual tools you use to make strategy happen.

Past and present

Even though strategy focuses on the future, your past has an effect on it. The knowledge, skills and talents you have today were created in the past. You also have to understand where you are now and to understand how you can get in a position in which you want to be in the future. You cannot create a strategy to get there without understanding your past and your present situation. You depend on them when you are defining the position you want to be in.

First, you need to know where you are right now. You need to know your knowledge, skills and talents and other assets you have like your relationships and finances. You have to understand what is unique about them. You also need to know what you don´t know, what you cannot do, and what is hard or impossible for you to accomplish. You have to find out brutal facts and separate them from your beliefs. You cannot figure all these things yourself. You need help. Ask your unbiased friends or have yourself tested. Consult professionals. When you know where you are, you can find the best opportunities to get where you want to be. And you can also see obstacles to get there.

If your strategy has an effect on other people, consult them about it. There are some things that you can figure out only by yourself. For example, what things make you feel great? What things make you feel weak? For example, I feel great when I can figure out how things are connected and feel weak when I have to communicate with the people I don´t like or know well. Nobody can tell you these things.

Remember that some of these things change. You are not the same person five years from now. Be prepared for changes. After you have figured out all the facts about things mentioned before, you can start designing a strategy for the future. You start with strategic vision and compress it to your strategic intent. Then you figure out your strategic objectives to accomplish your intent. Finally, you start executing your strategy.

Future

Your strategic vision tells you about where you want to be and when. You have to think what you can accomplish in the future, is it worth the effort, and it tells you what you want to accomplish and why you want to do it. It also tells you when you when you want all these things to happen. You make a vision for future that is many years from the date you finish it. Your strategic vision have to answer three sets of questions. First, what is the valuable and unique position you want to be in and what this position means to you and all the people it has an effect on. Second, what are the benefits you can offer them? What is the difference between these benefits and benefits your competitors offer to them? Third, what are your guiding values for achieving your unique position?

When you are done with your strategic vision, you have to compress it to strategic intent. Your stratetic intent has to be short and concise compared to your strategic vision. All the people who has to deal with it has to be behind it. It doesn´t matter whether they are your colleagues at work or your family. The best time span for it is from three to five years. It has to be challenging and visionary. A simple example of strategic intent is ”I want to be number one in X in region Y five years from now!”

After you have done your assessment of the present situation, where you want to be in the future and defined your strategic vision and intent, you have to figure out strategic objectives. They are initiatives to lead you from present to the future. These objectives are building blocks of the strategic intent. But they are for shorter period of time than the intent. Objectives need to be:

• Interconnected with the strategic vision and strategic intent;
• Large enough to get the desired result;
• Clear, compact, and desired;
• Specific about what you are trying to accomplish; and
• Quantitatively measurable

Finally, when you have put all these things together, you can define the action plan to get where you want to be and you can have your measurable strategic objectives ready for executing the plan. Be aware that in war no plan survives the first encounter with the enemy. The same happens to your strategy while you are executing it. You will probably have to change your plan and its objectives. You may even have to change your strategic intent.

To be fair, my knowledge and skills about strategy are very limited. Please be free to correct any mistakes in the text. I doubt it is complete enough for this mental model. I will get back to this theme when I understand and learn more about it.

-TT