Squiggly sprint 24: Day 6 - Strategic Thinking

It’s Day 6 of the SquigglySprint, and eagle-eyed may have noticed that there was no post for day 5… I was busy entertaining visiting friends at a music festival this weekend, so I will have to catch up. On an unrelated note, Pulp are awesome live, and if there is any justice in the world L'Impératrice will be the next Daft Punk.

Anyway.. Day 6 is on the topic of strategic thinking. I empathize with Sarah and Helen’s comments about spending all the time on the day-to-day tasks of work. It is so easy to get caught up in the firefighting of the day job, especially when you have fires burning all around you that it is seemingly impossible to tamp down. This can make you feel like you have no time to actually think about the bigger picture.

One of the most useful tools that I have for big picture thinking is one that can help you get out of this rut. That is to identify the constraints that you are under, and questions why they are there.

As a simple example, you may have a daily check-in with your team that was useful once, but now isn’t of value. Conversely, it is burning time that the whole team could be used elsewhere. After all, meetings don’t just burn an hour of your time, but an hour of everyone in the meeting.

The question then is why have the meeting? Perhaps the reason is no longer there, and the constraint is not needed. Or perhaps there is a good reason for it, such as information sharing about tactical issues of the day. Then the question is how do you achieve the same goal without the constraint of the meeting? Can it be done through slack, or a dashboard, or can you only have the meeting if someone has something to share? This is similar to the TRIZ approach in engineering, of “How do I increase A (time) without decreasing B (Communication)”.

All this is very tactical, and will help you find time for strategic thinking, but what does it mean for strategy? The questions can be the same. How can we sell in Asia without constraining ourselves to employ someone there? How can we enable customers to install the software themselves without needing an engineer to do it for them? How can we improve student performance if we only have a limited budget to work from? Or to paraphrase the whole tagline of AmazingIf, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if…”