Strategy of Means

If you are rethinking your strategy, you can’t just think about why and what – you need to give true respect to the how.

‘From the sublime to the ridiculous is just one step.’

(Napoleon Bonaparte on his return from Russia)

Thinking future-back

Strategy planning always exists in a tension between organisational life as it is, as it has been, and life as you would like it to be.

It’s impossible to build a coherent plan to win and change without uprooting yourself from much of what is holding you back.

Without getting into a new Room and projecting yourself into an alternative future, where seemingly impossible goals have been reached.

In this process, new voices come to the fore.

People whose skill is to look outside, rather than your own immediate world.

People who have the skill to write inspiring new Ends for your story.

People who can find ingenious new Ways to help you transform: new products, new teams, new processes, new initiatives.

The thing that is most likely to fall out of your strategic thinking, to fall off the agenda, is the Means. And I’ve talked before about how I think that’s a big mistake.

CLARITY – A model to build good strategy, quickly

The Two Rooms Trap

It’s such a relief to forget about BAU for a while. To stop thinking about tiny wrinkles in customer service, in contracts, in operations, in cost, and to focus on the future.

BAU obviously needs its own workstreams, in a different Room. In that Room it’s down to the wise old heads, the operational and financial experts, to help you keep things on track and help you work out how you are going to afford all this exciting new stuff.

In that Room you think about the Means. The pounds and pence. The tools and, worst of all, the office space.

But if you’re in two Rooms, you’re already toast.

Your future has already most likely been written. And that future is sub-optimal continuation of BAU, and a few new initiatives with a lowish chance of success.

The truth is that your Means are not just fuel for your new objectives. BAU is not just an engine to keep running on less and less fuel. The three points of the triangle, Ends, Ways and Means, are totally integral to each other and must not be divided. They have to be in the same room, and fused together.

How could it be otherwise?

Reality check

Here’s one way it could be otherwise: because the Means have become so complex that the people who set the Ends and design the Ways don’t really understand them any more. Whether it’s the data infrastructure, the operational process or the budgeting structure, the understanding of the Means has become super-specialised. Highly invested, but fundamentally disenfranchised. Obviously totally essential and fundamental, but too complex to bring into the room, or for the decision makers to understand full. Hang on a second…that’s crazy!

Here’s another way it could be otherwise: because the money and the vision are telling you different stories. Because you are tired of being dragged back into the mire by talk of existing revenue streams, margin management or cost rationalisation. Because the people who manage the money just don’t get it – they are rooted in the past. Well, if they don’t get it, maybe you aren’t explaining it properly…or, god forbid, maybe you are wrong?!

The best, most sustainable, most interesting strategic process is always going to come from triangulating three skill sets:

• the visionaries, who can help you to set new horizons based on understanding of the emerging world
• the planners, who have the depth of expertise to help you devise a plan to get there
• the pragmatists, who have the entrepreneurialism, the problem-solving ability, the deep understanding of resources to make sure it actually happens

And so often these skillsets are separated. Perhaps nowhere more so than in the world of advertising. Consultants and analysts have increasingly have become the wizards of Ends – helping people to set far-reaching new goals. Creative agencies excel at Ways – creating the logical bridges that will take you from A to B. And media agencies are the alchemists of Means – able to hold the thought that a solution that is 20% less accurate can be 33% more effective because for a limited time it is 40% less expensive.

But they are far too rarely on the same page. And that means the path ahead is much harder.

Because your Means are the bridge between your present and your future, and if it isn’t built properly, you’ve got no chance.

Strategy of Means

Strategy of Means can be hard to confront. But it has to be a fundamental part of the discussion. Your Means have to become more than a restriction, a millstone, or a brake. They are your oxygen, your fuel, your tailwind.

During strategic planning, questions about your means shouldn’t be the reluctant afterthought once you’ve worked out what you want to do. They should be central.

And here are some great prompting Means questions:

1. What’s our most underused asset?

Zero-based budgeting is a principle more often spoken about than applied, and often applied only as a way of reducing cost rather than of mapping cost to value. But the point of not assuming that all strategies cost money is an essential one, and above all it should focus people on looking to their assets, not only to their budgets.

The most cost-effective way of achieving an objective – and often also the best and fastest way – will be to reskin or redirect an asset that is already in place, or an initiative that is already in flight but on just slightly the wrong trajectory.

Starting strategic planning with a fresh-eyes perspective on everything that is already in play will give you a much better sense of the materials available, and is likely to unlock, rather than limit your thinking.

2. What can we just stop doing?

For many, budget planning processes are necessarily at the moment a process of cost reduction. That’s inevitable, in a tough market – lower costs increase your resilience and give you freedom, as long as you haven’t weakened every muscle along the way.

But weakening every muscle is so often what we do – precisely because of the ‘Two Rooms’ scenario. An operational task force, given a goal of a 20% cost reduction in BAU, will tend to make every element of BAU between 15% and 25% cheaper, or to try to cut the time on every task by a similar amount. It’s an optimisation task, given to a group of people who specialise in optimisation.

It has to be accompanied by a strategic task – which is to survey every single priority, initiative, tool and team within the complex and get rid of them if doing so will not significantly undermine the overall edifice. Or in other words, kill some stuff that you took as read – and use the resources, the time and the mental bandwidth for something more useful. The damage is often much, much less than you expect it to be, and there can be a huge energy dividend.

3. What resources do we need for long-term incubation?

In challenging times, with big short-term requirements, it’s easy to default to a language of Big Bets and Big Cuts. But the future hasn’t gone away, and it’s absolutely certain that it’s going to demand new thinking, new products, and new capabilities. If you red-line all of these, you are heading for disaster.

In fact, I’d argue that in volatile times, where the path to success is less certain, most businesses need to be making more diverse investments in the future, not less. Now it is totally incumbent on Room 2 to challenge this – how can we invest speculatively when Cash is such a burning issue. But it’s incumbent on both rooms together to find a solution – and to work out what is needed to incubate the potential futures whilst fighting street to street in the now.

The key here is to focus on what is required to incubate, rather than what is required to build. What does it really cost to focus the right experts on building something great, and testing it in the market? What does it really cost to give them some air cover, and to accurately measure their impact? That’s the resource that is required…and it’s essential to find it, especially when times are tough.

4. What does it take to do the biggest things properly?

That being said, if something’s already been incubated, or a major change to your core business is in the works, it absolutely has to be done properly, and the Two Rooms together have to ensure that all the resources you have at your disposal are being used ingeniously, with commitment and with entrepreneurial flair to make sure you pull it off.

Whether it’s a new launch, a rebrand, a massive tender, and an internal change or anything else, it makes no sense at all to go off without full commitment. If this means cutting the list of initiatives, do it. If it means redirecting more teams to support, do it.

Failure is always a distinct possibility. But when it comes to the biggest bet, you need to leave nothing on the table…if 10% more effort marginally increases the chances of success, don’t think about the 10%, but about the 90%+ that is about to go down the drain if you don’t make it stick.

5. Where is the value that others aren’t seeing?

The final principle of means is to be tightly attuned to external markets, and to remember that the cost of nothing is fixed, and that the law of supply and demand is almost universal, and filled with bubbles of inefficiency. If you can see value where others don’t, then your money will go much, much further.

Nowhere is this more valuable than in raw material markets – whether those materials are tangible physical items, or attention commodities like media, or indeed in talent markets. I’ve written recently about the tendency of marketing in particular to be extremely susceptible to groupthink (https://www.hookstrategylimited.com/post/an-agreeability-of-marketers) – the ability to resist it comes with enormous value.

This is where unusual, counter-cultural partnerships become incredibly valuable – between strategists and traders, marketing and procurement, planners are project managers – bringing the thinking and the shifting markets of materials of money and time as close to each other as possible.

There are many ways to define strategy. It’s how you win. It’s the paths you don’t take. It’s a plan that takes you forward. In all those definitions, it can’t just be about the Ends, or the Ways. You need a Strategy of Means, too. And it’s all connected.