Strategy as Disciplined Imagination

Strategy isn’t a plan.

It’s a provocation.

A story about a future you’re willing to bet on.

It’s not prediction.

It’s preparation.

Slide decks don’t move people.

Artifacts do.

Prototypes do.

Worlds implied and imbued in an implication of a thing you can see, touch, and test.

When I try to make sense of an idea I have, one that is liminal and something I felt more than I could articulate, I make a prototype, a piece of software or hardware that feels plausible, that functions, yet is mostly here to give some structure to an thought, a feeling, an instinct. The refinement of an idea, where the refining is process; new ideas effervesce from the process of making.

I make a prototype to help me think, to help me see into an idea, to help me make sense.

That, in my mind, is the essense of strategy.

Strategy is making sense of what could be, enrolling stakeholders in that sense of possibility.