6.2. Selecting "The One"

Perhaps you are thinking that any one of the options on the table in a given situation would have been good enough, and in fact that might be true. Sometimes good enough is indeed enough. But more often, choosing the best option matters. In this case, the "best" option is whatever makes the most sense for this organization, at this particular time, given the market conditions, matched to internal capabilities, considering allocated resources, and so on. By selecting the best option, you have a higher likelihood of achieving the vision behind the strategy.

Imagine your goal is to cross a vast expanse of territory to acquire something of value and return safely. The kind of vehicle you select to achieve this goal will depend on what particular territory you're crossing—its topography, climate, and obstacles—as well as the cargo you need to transport, the amount of risk that's acceptable, and the resources you have available.

If you have mountains to traverse, for example, you might choose a helicopter. If you are facing frozen tundra, you might choose a snowmobile. Each vehicle has particular characteristics and strengths that make it the right vehicle for a particular terrain: its rate of speed, its ability to move past obstacles, the number of people it can carry from here to there.

Strategy development works in much the same way. By the time you arrive at the 99-point slide, what you find in front of you is the equivalent of a fine array of nice-looking transportation vehicles that you've worked very hard to assemble. Each of them will appear to get you from here to there. But which do you choose? Helicopter? Biplane? Humvee? Hovercraft? How will you decide? Might you need to involve a person who knows the details about the terrain, the cargo, and your resources? In practical terms, obviously, it's essential to make a decision. It wouldn't work to have half the team prepare the hovercraft and the other half jump in the helicopter. Unintentionally pursuing multiple options in parallel will waste resources and put your best people in competition for no good reason. Failing to choose means failing to achieve the goal.

With respect to strategy selection, deciding on one strategy option will dramatically improve your chances of getting where you want to go.

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Tip:

For any given situation, one option is superior to all others. The question is, which one?

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And is there really just one answer? I think there is. But let me be clear that by one strategy I mean an inclusive and complete strategy. So "one" is not about a singular idea. One strategy can contain many different ideas, but they must come together in a unified way. At an operating level, this might look like one channel strategy, or one retail strategy, or one enterprise strategy, or a combination of ideas, as long as they work as a unified whole. Using our prior example of transportation vehicles, we would use the word "helicopter" to describe the capabilities and discrete items that come together to form an entire strategy. The word itself is simply a container that combines many things within it. It's the kind of "one" that poet Walt Whitman evokes in "I contain multitudes." And when I use "one," I am using the word as a kind of logical handle that lets us simplify the way we talk about the array of complex options we ultimately need to prioritize.

Most organizations can align with only a certain number of efforts at a time. Thus, figuring out which vehicles—or which strategies or options—not to take is also key. When the issue of "what not to do" is left unanswered, strategies get interpreted many different ways and can fail as a result.

Under the time pressure of everyday business and in the absence of a good selection process, teams tend not to build a rich list of options, since doing so often seems to make the decision process harder. That is, organizations and teams that have a selection process actually do a better job of generating options to win.

So what you need is a process framework that allows your group to kill off ideas and get to the right strategy for that time and that situation. You need an agreed-upon way to work with the necessary mix of people to align with what's important so you can shorten the list, dig into the details of the remaining options to figure out what's doable, and finally, fix what's not quite right to get to a limited set of truly interesting options. If the limited set has only one option, you're done. Otherwise, you and your team need to weigh the items against each other and make a decision so that you have a single agreed-upon strategy. Not only that, but you have to do it fast, or the next time people will revert to the command-and-control option of deciding and telling others.

The framework that can help organizations make complex yet subjective strategic decisions is one I affectionately call MurderBoarding. You might think it sounds a bit sinister, but successful businesses use this framework strategy for good purposes.