How to Create a Strategy Table
Intro: A Word on Decision Quality
Decisions are often both the main value driver and constraint in an organization. And yet we do not tend to focus on them. The desire seems to be to keep the focus on execution, which, if we were the decider, is probably where we’d want the focus to remain as well.
Attempts to remedy this seem largely confined to behests that we fail fast, focus on outcomes over output, and learn our way forward with agility. There is, it would seem, a lot that organizations could learn from the field of Decision Quality, or DQ for short. As DQ stresses—and this is something many people find strongly counterintuitive—the quality of a decision has nothing to do with its outcome.
Thanks for reading The Lateral Lens! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Subscribed
A bad decision can have a good outcome, and vice versa. Ignoring this is the very definition of hindsight bias. DQ makes clear that a decision is an action and that the quality of a decision is determined by how uncertainty and cognitive bias have been treated up until the time of that action. DQ thus emphasizes the criticality of frame exploration and optimization.
Frame optimization can be thought of as “box breaking”, as surfacing and vetting the assumptions that scope current thinking, generating new frames and formulations. Above it was noted that Agile does not really help improve decision quality. Interestingly, Agile might even impede decision quality when and where it results in “iterating in a box”, in narrow pivots that fail to sufficiently surface and challenge the current frame.
The problem frame is not the same thing a a problem statement. It’s hidden. It’s the assumptions, emotions, and attitudes we project into the problem space, impacting our experience of and options perceived in that space, influencing what we even see as possible problem statements. This criticism isn’t a problem with Agile by the way. Agility helps us respond to outcomes. DQ helps us optimize decisions before action is taken. Both are needed.
Agile or no, the reality is that transparent, well-framed decisions will create more value in the long run than decisions where such derisking has not occurred. It often, however, takes thoughtful facilitation to make frames visible, explore alternatives, and avoid the opportunity cost of business as usual, wherein deciders use their clout to enshrine their current thinking without improving it.
Even if we know that decisions should be presented as options, our tendency will be to sneak our advocacy in, packaging our preference with two inferior alternatives. This is like a magician attempting to force a preselected card. As DQ emphasizes, however, the quality of any decision is determined by the best alternatives that were available at the time the decision was made.
As with frame exploration, surfacing such alternatives often requires smart facilitation. Throughout this process, it is key that the facilitator not be the decider. The facilitator must, however, work directly with the decider(s) and not with gatekeepers, proxies, or assistants.
There are many tools in the DQ toolkit. What we’ll go through here is an activity from the Strategic Decisions Group. I have a couple of their certifications through Stanford and later learned a streamlined flow from strategist Shashi Jain. After further modifying it a bit, what it leaves us with is a brief activity that can quickly create big value.
Creating a Strategy Table
DQ defines a strategy as a coherent set of decisions in service of a concrete goal. This means that, contrary to popular belief, a strategy is not a goal. A strategy is what you are doing to achieve a goal. Building a strategy table helps to lay this all out.
We will here assume this activity is being done virtually. The first step is to identify the goal. What is the problem you are strategizing about? Pick one. The more expensive the problem, the easier it will be to demonstrate value.
The next step is to identify participants. Who is the decider? Who are the relevant experts and stakeholders that should be included? In general, the more diverse the group the more robust the output.
After gaining buy-in from identified participants, schedule the strategy session. The first activity is “issue raising”. This can be assigned as prework. Ask participants to capture any issues that will need to be resolved for the selected goal or problem.
It can be helpful here to invite participants to “try on different hats”. What types of issues might customers raise? Management? The competition? What types of issues would a naysayer raise? Once everyone has emailed their responses, transfer them to virtual stickies, one issue per.
With this prework in hand, you will start the strategy session itself by reviewing the target problem. Next facilitate the group going through the collective pool of issues raised. If participants think of new issues while going through them, then add them.
Next ask the group to cluster similar issues. Move the virtual stickies around as they discuss. Have the group consider if each cluster is one large decision. If so, replace with a new sticky. If not, hash out how many separate decisions are really at play. Any stickies that are not decisions (that do not require action) should be restated as decisions or eliminated. You will now have a large pool of decisions.
The next step in this process is to map these onto a decision hierarchy, which is a triangle with three levels. The top row of the hierarchy is for decisions that are off the table. These are decisions that are already made or beyond the group’s control. The bottom is for decisions that can be safely postponed and dealt with later. The middle row is for the decisions the group needs to make now. Try to limit this to no more than five, what Shashi Jain calls the “Focus Five”.
At this point it is a good idea to pause and have the group vet the decision hierarchy. Check in with the decider, the participant with the authority to decide on whatever strategy is recommended. (They need to be there, remember?)
Do they agree with this categorization? Has every decision in the top row really already been made? If the decider reconsiders, then move some stickies around. Add or remove stickies as needed based on the evolving conversation. If the decider approves of the hierarchy, then move on to the next step.
Now look at the decisions in the middle row, the Focus Five. Are there any that would need to happen before or after any of the others? Have the group order the Focus Five in a logical left-to-right order.
Once done, paste these on a new slide, placing vertical lines between each. These are now the column headers of the strategy table. (Thus, if there were only 3 decisions in the middle row of the decision hierarchy, which is fine, then the strategy table will have 3 columns.)
To start building out the table, start with the leftmost sticky and have the group brainstorm alternative possible actions for that decision. What options are available?
As a quick aside, sometimes people say the options here should be “MECE”, or “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive”. While it is good to try and be exhaustive, I personally don’t worry about the choices being mutually exclusive, and for a simple reason. The group might come up with value-adding options that should all be done, and I’m not going to nix exploring that just because they aren’t “mutually exclusive”.
When the choices have been unpacked for each decision, you have a strategy table! The column headers are the decisions to be made and the table’s content are the options identified for each decision. Remember, a strategy is a coherent set of decisions in service of a goal. Thus, exploring the table can now help the group construct and explore alternative strategies, with an individual strategy being a unique path through the table.
There will be many possible paths through the table, making for a lot of possible strategies. For instance, a table with 5 columns and 5 options each has 324 possible strategies (more if > 1 option can be selected).
Only a few of these possible paths, however, will typically stand out to the group as viable. It may therefore require some facilitation to get the group to broaden their options. A good idea is to do a “mild-to-wild” exercise, capturing the more salient paths and encouraging the group to then consider more out of the box or “outrageous” alternatives.
Exploring Alternative Strategies
In DQ the process of selecting a choice for each decision is called “stringing”. Originally the different paths through the table were marked with tacks and colored yarn. I’ve also seen people use colored markers on whiteboards, colored stickers, or even Excel. (To make an Excel table work every option for each column must be repeated in every row of the table.)
Since we’re here doing this virtually, and since I prefer something closer to the original method, we’ll do our “stringing” by marking selected options with colored circles.
Once a path through the table has been completed have the group name its theme. Insert this to the left of the table using a rectangle matching the color of its respective circles.
Next have the group affinitize the rectangles. Some of the resulting strategies will be similar variations on a larger theme. Others might be logically grouped together, making for a more complete and robust strategy. Exploring these themes will also help the group see value-adding options that are missing from the columns. Add them!
Have the group rank order the resulting clusters, placing the most promising at the top.
In our present example, the group you are working with was originally asking for a dashboard to help create graphs for a recurring 2-hour planning meeting. In this meeting decisions are made based on estimates that ultimately boil down to best guesses made by subject matter experts.
Business as usual would be to build the dashboard being requested and then leave everything else the same. Imagine instead you get a group to agree to do this strategy exercise. You help them build out a strategy table, surfacing many other things that could be done to improve the wider situation that makes the meeting necessary in the first place.
This helps the group surface multiple related issues, root cause them, and explore alternative ways to make more comprehensive improvements. The issues surfaced in the exercise include the accuracy of the estimates themselves, concerns with the meeting and how it is run, the focus of the roles involved, as well as the flow of the overall process.
Rather than simply complying with the request, the group now, with the support of the decider, has aligned on a more holistic approach, seeking to redesign the entire workflow.
When doing a strategy table, the final strategy decided on will often be some hybrid of the original themes identified in the stringing exercise, likely incorporating newer ideas uncovered as the strategy themes are explored and discussed.
DQ stresses that frame exploration matters 6x more than any other analysis. Thus, the main aim here is not to pick the “best strategy” from the initial stringing but to capture the group’s collective wisdom in a way that all can see, to work with it, explore it, and improve it.
This helps the group move well beyond their initial thoughts to stronger strategies no one was considering prior to the exercise.
If you have any questions, let me know!
Until next time.