Strategy is also avoiding distractions
April 2024
Having a clear mission, clear goals, and a clear strategy is the first step on alignment and strategic thinking, but what happens after that has a huge impact on making you succeed or fail.
To focus on your goals, you need to avoid distractions. To avoid distractions, you need to identify them.
With that in mind, let’s get on with it!
What is a distraction?
Anything that moves you away from the intended course of action outlined by your strategy.
You can find out how to clarify your strategy by checking the previous article on how to set a mission for your team, and the one on how to build a strategy based on that mission.
Distractions can come in various forms, such as unexpected events, competing priorities, or tempting opportunities that arise along the way. They delay progress towards strategic objectives by causing individuals or organizations to deviate from the planned path or lose focus on key priorities.
The problem is, how do you identify them?
Define your strategic filters
Because you have a clear strategy, you can now define your strategic filters.
Strategic filters are a set of questions that evaluate an initiative against your strategy. Applying those filters can tell you if the initiative is a distraction, or if it’s worth pursuing. This isn’t an exact science, so you won’t get a score to qualify an idea as good or bad. Still, they will help you on making decisions.
Some examples
If, for example, your strategy is “Grow our platform”, you can create the following filters to analyse new features:
- Does this functionality that makes sense for our platform?
- Is this a one-off or will this help other users?
- Is this making the platform simpler or more complex?
- Is it worth the cost?
If the strategy is something like “Improve customer satisfaction by one point this year”, a different set of filters can be:
- Does it improve the user experience? and how?
- What pain points is this removing?
- How long will it take us to build this?
You then need to decide, based on your answers, if you consider the idea valid, or discard it as a distraction.
You can come up with as many filters as you need, and they should change with your strategy. The important thing is to be consistent applying them and to always match them with your overall strategy and goals.
That’s all!