Steps to Strategy
Making time to think big picture
If you’re in an engineering leadership role, I’m sure you’ve been told to take time to step back and look at the big picture. It seems obvious and straight forward to carry out. Make time to progress on the strategic aspect of your role so that you can evolve the technical vision and create long term plans for the organization. In a word, be “strategic”. And, if you’re like me, you may have struggled to heed this advice.
The demands of the current moment can create a feedback loop that makes the strategic work harder and harder. Without longer term plans in place, you can’t delegate as effectively. Since you haven’t delegated as much, there’s more you need to solve for today. It’s all too easy to disregard the calendar block reserved for strategic work to address an immediate item you know you can complete.
Even if you succeed in carving out and respecting your “think time”, making productive use of it is nearly impossible if you’re tired and emotionally drained from supporting your teams, keeping projects on track, and putting out fires. There’s no magic recipe to break out of this cycle, but I can offer a few reminders and suggestions.
• Remember to put your own oxygen mask on first. You will be far more effective and achieve a stronger impact if you take care of yourself.
• Accept that you will drop some balls in a tradeoff for being able to plan and build a more resilient system. Carefully choose what you will drop and communicate it.
• Block off thinking time when you you’ll be fresh and have the energy. Shut off notifications. Try changing your physical location, using pen and paper, or recording yourself and literally thinking out loud.
Probably the most important suggestions here are to block time when you are most likely to be in a frame of mind to do this sort of high level thinking and to remove interruptions for the time block.
Another factor that often pushes us away from the big picture work is that “vision” and long term plans are fuzzy ill-defined things compared to the immediate, sometimes urgent, day-to-day tasks and challenges. The day-to-day work is satisfying because progress is measurable. We get a sense of accomplishment and fast feedback unlike the strategic work that by definition plays out over a longer time span. We often jump into our high altitude rumination without defining more specifically what we’re hoping to achieve. That makes it difficult to assess our progress and that, in turn, makes us less motivated to repeat the exercise. Adding some initial constraints on your strategy work can move it from fuzzy to defined. The more well-defined the work, the more achievable it will feel. You can help yourself build momentum by reducing the time horizon to 90 days and picking a single area to work on. For many organization, putting a focus on what you can do to make the next planning cycle go smoothly is a useful and concrete place to start.
If you’ve succeeded in breaking the avoidance cycle on your strategic thinking work and built some momentum by focusing on the 90 day horizon, you might find one of the following prompts useful to help you explore further into the future.
• Wish list. Make a list of things you’d like to be true in 6, 12, or 24 months. These could be aspects of the team’s process, quality targets, or product capabilities. Then pick one and work backwards to uncover how you might achieve such an outcome.
• Worry list. Imagine that you quit big picture thinking and make no strategic plans. What are the biggest problems you’ll face in a year?
• Back to the future. Look back and consider being able to change past decisions and directions. What if we didn’t build X? What do we wish we had done differently? What would you do if you were starting fresh? These can be good clues to explore for shaping the future.
• 10x. Apply order of magnitude changes as a thinking tool to identify interesting leverage points. What if the service was 10x faster or 10x more efficient? What if we had 10x the traffic, data, or users?
One other valuable approach to mention is to look outside your organization to gather ideas and get feedback on your assessments. Will Larson outlines an approach you can follow in his post Setting organizational direction (see the section Mining for direction).
Now that you’ve got a full notebook of ideas and possible plans, there’s an opposing force for you to consider. How much capacity do you have to put towards longer term initiatives? Your ability to realize the vision you’ve described and execute on long-term plans is constrained by the current context of your organization. Assess where there is slack in the organization and identify individuals you could invite to help. Use this feedback loop to identify plans you can delegate and put into play sooner and to highlight how you may need to shift responsibilities, commitments, or staffing as a prerequisite to implementing your longer term plans.
Was there something useful here for you? Want to share an approach I didn’t cover or ask a question?