Why there’s No Right Way to do Things Like Strategy

Today’s post is by Natasha Golinsky, founder of Next Level Nonprofits.

I saw an article on Harvard Business Review this week that I thought was dead on –Why Smart People Struggle with Strategy. As I read the quote “The problem with smart people is that they are used to seeking and finding the right answer; unfortunately, in strategy there is no single right answer to find” my entire life flashed before my eyes. I saw myself in high school on an event planning committee totally stressing out over the details of something. I saw myself as a young professional totally micro-managing the development of a course I was writing. I saw myself yesterday almost melting down as my kids were being graded for their final home-school report cards. My entire life has been a chronic search for the “right way” to get a job done.

If you’ve been at a startup for any length of time you’ll know that there is no recipe for success. During my first ten years in business I would regularly go out of my way to meet other leaders who were experiencing a lot of success in my field and ask them “what did you do to achieve your results” and they would give me an answer that was totally opposite of what the person I had sat down with last week had said. The inevitable result of each weekly coffee date was total confusion and discouragement. I would find myself trying to create a master strategy by fusing together everyone’s best tips hoping I would strike gold. The mix and match approached never really worked out financially but did a great job of driving my confidence as a business leader way down. I was following the best advice I knew and was getting nowhere.

Have you ever felt like that? You read a great blog post about what it takes to succeed only to read a totally contradictory post the next day but both are working for those individuals? “Who’s right” is probably what you ask yourself. My best response: instead of looking at what they’re doing differently, look at what they’re doing that’s the same. One of your competitor organizations may be having a lot of success gaining visibility through Facebook while another doesn’t use Facebook at all but uses Twitter. Who’s right? Both. Both invest in communicating with their stakeholders. No one method is the right way. What works for one may or may not work for the other; you’ve got to remove all expectations, try it out and see what happens for yourself. Who knows? It may work great or it might not work at all. Unfortunately there is no other way to really know for sure.

I know when dollars are tight are you’re just getting started it is very easy to want to have everything figured out before you launch. Resources are tight and there is no time or money to be wasted so we go crazy looking for solutions that come with a guarantee.

As you know by now I’m obsessed with planning and agree that it is wise to do your homework before you run hard with an idea. But there comes a point when you have enough info to get started and you have to see what happens.

In project planning conversations with my colleagues I’m always the one to ask “do we have enough data to support that course of action” to which they always reply “you’re over thinking this. Let’s try it and adjust from there.” After a few deep breaths I try to remind myself that until we run our idea in Beta mode, we’ll never get the feedback we need to make improvements on our concept.

As afraid as I am of putting an imperfect program on the open market for ridicule, I’m more afraid of waiting for everything to be perfect and never getting anywhere. John Maxwell has a great book called Failing Forward where he explains how to actually turn our mistakes into stepping stones for success. Great advice for any of us perfectionist leaders. Plan. Do. Review. Repeat.

They say the enemy of good is great. Sometimes good enough really is good enough to get you started. Do you have a project or a program that you’ve been putting off getting out there because it’s not “ready” yet? Drop me a comment by email or Twitter, I’d love to hear more about where you’re getting stuck.

– Natasha Golinsky is the founder of Next Level Nonprofits – an online training company dedicated to equipping new nonprofit Executive Directors with the skills and support they need to enjoy successful, sustainable and satisfying careers. You can get in touch with her on LinkedIn or on her blog.

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Photo:        by Dan Nevill