- Inconsistency
- Real Expertise
- Focus
- Laggership and Entropy
- Pragmatism
How to begin assessing your strategic capacity? The concept of the Five Virtues of a Strategist is all about how this is done, and you want to keep doing it as your career progresses.
You’ll need to ask yourself critical questions about how you approach ideas, questions, opportunities, dangers, and challenges.
Use these questions as tools to develop your personal behaviors. Systematically questioning yourself leads to a better understanding of why you choose to be strategic—in other words, what your intentions are for thinking and acting strategically.
The result, if you organize it, tends to fall into five specific behavior or intention categories I refer to as the Virtues of the Strategist. Virtues or principles and guidelines for your thinking, behavior, and recommendations. Sometimes they are also expressions of your intentions:
- Inconsistency
- Real Expertise
- Focus
- Laggership and Entropy
- Pragmatism
Another benefit of this personal questioning process is that it will help you determine just how strategic you really are or can be. To help accomplish this task, assess yourself against each of the following strategic thinking guidelines or virtues outlined in this series.
Virtue #1: Inconsistency
The strategist is intentionally inconsistent. In strategy, inconsistency is a virtue. Strategists relentlessly question all assumptions. The goal, always, is to identify a different approach, to discover new options, to try new and unconventional combinations of ideas and concepts.
Inconsistency leads to constructive surprise.
Are you predictable? Do you approach most problems in the very same way? Is what you recommend and think about virtually the same in every situation? Are you bound up every time, looking at everything through the lens of your staff function?
Be intentionally different. Grab the wrong end of the telescope. Think about things from a different perspective, intentionally, relentlessly. This is a state of mind.
Advisors of the highest value to leaders and managers are often those who can see things from an entirely different perspective. When you study classic military strategist—Sun Tzu, Von Clausewitz, B. H. Liddell Hart, and others—all stress that one key to victory is acting differently than the opposition expects.
Here’s the story of where three unexpected actions led to a faster, better, and more humane result. A client of mine operating an educational facility for children with special needs was in a situation where a teacher mistakenly loaned a student a videotape of sexually explicit material, which was subsequently shown to the student’s family. The child’s father was so irate that he rushed to the school, beat up the teacher, hired a lawyer, and threatened to sue, all in the first three hours of the incident. The facility’s standard procedure for responding to allegations was to sit tight, let a little time pass, and see if cooler heads could prevail or if a simple solution might emerge.
My approach was to move much more aggressively. The allegations from this incident were potentially very explosive. Having worked through similar situations in the past, I had learned one big lesson: bad situations like this one ripen badly. Highly emotional situations such as this one, unless dealt with positively and fast, trigger anger, irritation, suspicion, and emotion, which then grow and feed on each other.
Because the head of the school was a man about the same age as the father and both had boys the same age, I suggested that the president immediately write a letter of sympathy, explanation, and apology to this father and offer to meet promptly to work out whatever problems might have been caused by the event. After a brief conversation with the school’s attorneys, it was agreed that the letter should be sent directly to the victim’s father.
As I expected, the father’s attorney called, boiling mad, and demanded to know whose idea it was to send this letter. He threatened to file an ethics violation with the local bar association against legal counsel. However, I knew that because the president of the school was not a lawyer, the father of the boy was not an attorney, and I was not an attorney, we were not subject to the rules of legal procedure. Had we followed legal procedure, it might have taken days, weeks, or even longer to schedule a meeting to talk about the situation. As it turned out, this very prompt action on the day of the event triggered series of meetings that began within seventy-two hours, and a settlement occurred within five working days. Because of its speed and effectiveness, this rapid approach became standard operating procedure should similar events occur. The cost savings for legal and consulting fees can be enormous. Settlements are achieved quickly and fairly, and, generally, those affected remain clients and customers. The settlements are generous, empathetic, and, in many cases like this, long-term medical and psychological assistance is provided. The victims are relieved.
Think differently, move faster, make prompt, simple, sensible, doable, and appropriate suggestions or recommendations. Strategists generally ignore the conventional wisdoms and conforming customary solutions. I often refer to this technique as constructive surprise.