With “This is Strategy, Make Better Plans,” Seth Godin has written a well-crafted and delightfully practical book on strategy that brings a systems perspective to planning.
Seth Godin: This is Strategy, Make Better Plans
Godin defines strategy as “the hard work of choosing what to do today to improve our tomorrow.” He adopts a systems perspective throughout the book that resonated with my approach to planning and crating strategy. The book is a sequence 297 short essays that address different aspects of strategy, planning, and understanding how human systems respond and adapt to efforts to change them. It’s a fast read that packs the equivalent of year of his pithy blog posts between its covers.
He observes that “Human-built systems have elements in common. Generally, you’ll find:
- Boundaries—they begin and end somewhere
- Benefits—people voluntarily engage with a system because they believe in the promises it makes
- Bystanders—often, people who don’t want to be in the system are still involved in it
- Information flows—a shared language and expectations creates trust and efficiency
- Stability—the system offers its participants a reliable picture of the future
- Protocols—there are shorthands, processes, and methods of how things are done
- Roles—participants in the system seek or gain status and affiliation through their action
- Resilience and feedback loops—when something disrupts the system, it works to push back and regain equilibrium
- Convenience and efficiency—even though systems aren’t perfect, they offer participants outputs that encourage them to support it
- Side effects—every system also creates outputs that aren’t ideal for non-participants or those that are part of it.”
This is a good list of the elements to identify in a system that your strategy for change should comprehend
Godin suggest you can evaluate a strategy in the context of “a serious game with the following elements: players, rules, scarcity, choices, feedback loops, and outcomes. You move, then the system (actually, someone in the system) makes a move in return. There’s a competition—for attention, for resources, for slots—and there are outcomes. Often there are random elements as well. No player is perfect and no one wins all the time.”
17 questions to shine a light on the work to be done
Seth Godin offers a number of good checklists throughout the book, here are 17 questions to consider as part of evaluating he completeness of any strategy:
- Who are we here to serve?
- What is the change we seek to make?
- What are our resources?
- What is the genre we’re working in?
- Who has done something like this before me?
- What systems are in play?
- Am I changing someone’s status?
- Why would anyone voluntarily choose to be part of this work?
- What will they tell their colleagues?
- Who gains in status, affiliation and power by supporting this work?
- Will early support translate into more support later?
- Where is the network effect?
- What do I need to learn to make this work?
- Who do I need to work with?
- Where is the dip and when should I quit?
- What will I do if it doesn’t work out?
- How much is enough?
Several of these are subtle but quite important. In particular question seven highlights that changes can often mean some members of an organization lose status because their expertise has become less important or process changes involve adjustments to their role or job function. Question sixteen is a reminder of the need for backup and contingency plans.
Another aspect of crafting backup plans is doing a post mortem when things have not worked out the way you have anticipated. Godin offers a useful approach: “When the deal falls apart, the team loses the game, or a partnership hits the rocks, it’s easy to focus our energy on the most recent event. ‘What if they had called a different play?’ This overlooks the real issue. It’s the first move, or the fifth, that led to this problem, not what happened at the last moment. Creating the conditions for success is a very different project than finding a heroic move that saves the day.”
He also suggests a wariness for a fast start, urging a focus on resilience over leverage: “Too often, though, we celebrate the brittle head start without noticing that in the long run, the turtle did a lot better than anyone expected.” This latter observation reminds me of Craig Newmark’s answer to “How Craigslist Spread.”
“Our history is slow, continuous growth. In the race between tortoise and hare, well, we’re the slow guy”
Craig Newmark
It’s is worth keeping as your screen saver quote.
Useful Slogans for Strategy
Godin offers a number of slogans to maintain team morale and renew your gumption when the going gets tough, Here are my top eight:
- The future is an unvisited city, but we can see it from a distance
- The audience can be chosen
- Don’t play games you can’t win
- Projects can be managed
- We can make a difference.
- We can build assets.
- We can build networks.
- Effort is often part of our work, but effort by itself is not a strategy.
Morale and gumption are critical to the sustained effort needed for a strategy to bear fruit. Godin advises that, “Important solutions aren’t the work of right now. They are the persistent yet impatient work of building a strategy that’s effective by tapping systems that already exist to make a change happen that begins to construct the new systems needed.”
Consistent Actions Influence Others’ Behavior Over Time
Godin details a number of actions that leaded to success when put into practice consistently:
- “Think ahead and reason back: When we know who it’s for, what it’s for, and how we hope to get there, we can start at the end and work backward for where to begin.
- The empathy of a mutual win: We can avoid oppositional entanglements when we choose to work with people and systems that want to win something we don’t care so much about, especially when they offer us something we do care about.
- Follow through on commitments and threats to maintain credibility and influence others’ behavior. Tension is real if we are consistent.
- Use your unique knowledge or information to your advantage, but be aware that others may be doing the same.
- Encourage cooperation by engaging in repeated interactions and building a reputation for reciprocity.
- Build scaffolding: Demanding that masses of people leap is rarely as effective as creating the conditions for them to simply walk on board. Scaffolding is hard to find and priceless. There are often ways forward if we’re willing to look for them
- Create simple and useful metrics for status and stick with them.”
Scaffolding has special meaning to Godin, he defines it as the “the cultural and organizational support we get at the beginning of adopting a new idea or practice. It helps bridge the gap between what an individual can do without help and what they can do with guidance and encouragement from a skilled partner. If you seek to make systems change and you haven’t built the scaffolding for others to join you, it’s unlikely you will succeed.”
Don’t run out of money, and don’t run out of time.
Godin warns, “When we run out of time, we’re done. When we run out of money, we’re done. And if we’re done before we’ve made an impact, the entire effort is wasted. Living in surplus also creates long-term advantages. The process is simple but easy to forget: overwhelm the smallest viable audience with a solution that creates the conditions for them to take action. Repeat.”
He draws an analogy to trying to travel in a boat that’s not complete. Half a boat will sink, even a hundred foot long yacht with a one foot hole in it will ultimately sink.
He proposes that you can save money by ‘thrashing at the start.” Why? He explains, “Changing course and exploring your options are far cheaper at the start than they are at the end. Don’t run out of time, don’t run out of money. Hard decisions now ensure easier decisions tomorrow.”
Better Decisions and Better Outcomes
If others are regularly outperforming you, Godin outlines four possible reasons:
- They could have a systemic head start—this sort of luck doesn’t even out over time. If the system compounds their initial advantage, it’s going to take more than good decisions to overcome this.
- They could have an asset advantage—this is a form of head start. A small advantage in assets pays off, they buy more assets, and their lead continues. If the resources and network and skills they bring to bear are to their advantage, you’ll need to find a way to find the scaffolding you’ll need to replicate their performance.
- They could have access to better information. Decisions are based on what you know and how you see the world. If others are seeing more clearly than you do, you’ll need to see what they see.
- They might be better at making decisions than you are. If all other things are equal, and others are getting better outcomes with the same information and assets, you benefit when you acknowledge that they’re better at making decisions than you are—and then learn from what they do.
Better outcomes are not limited to just your situation but must include helping your allies. As a thought experiment, Godin outlines the challenges that Dorothy faces at the beginning of “The Wizard of Oz.” He asks, “How did Dorothy persuade the Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow to join her on the trip to see the Wizard? Did she make a case about how much she missed home?” It’s easy to be clear on your own needs and put them first as a result. Unfortunately your personal needs may have little effect on others. Godin concludes, “The lesson here is worth remembering. She created the conditions where the others could get what they wanted by joining her.”
Questions That Lead to Strategies
The last chapter has several pages of good questions. I have pulled my favorite out:
- Who is this project for? Who is my smallest viable audience?
- What change do I seek to make with this project?
- What is my strategy to make this change happen? Can I articulate it clearly?
- What resources and assets do I have to dedicate to this project?
- What is my timeline for this project? When does it ship and what is my deadline for calling it quits?
- Why would someone talk about or recommend my project to others?
- How can I create the conditions for a network effect to develop around my project?
- What can I learn to increase my odds of success? Where can I gain that knowledge?
- Where is the smallest viable audience?
- What asset would transform my project? How do I acquire it?
- If an early adopter talks about my project, what will they say?
- Am I building the scaffolding people will need to adopt and move forward?
- What partnerships, alliances or collaborations could increase the scaffolding around this project?
- What’s the process for altering the strategy based on what I learn?
- How will early successes of my project make later successes more likely?
- How do I shorten the delay in the relevant feedback loops (or learn to thrive with a longer delay)?
“You’ve always had what you needed to make a difference. But now you can see the systems, understand the games, and ask the questions to turn your project into work with impact. Persistently over time, person by person, day by day. Go Make a Ruckus!”
Seth Godin in This is Strategy, Make Better Plans (closing quote)