Why "be more strategic" is useless advice
Here's my guess: most people have had the following experience at work.
You work on something, send it out for feedback, and you get comments along the lines of:
- "Can we make this more strategic?"
- "Can we uplevel this a bit more?"
- "Can we make this more exec-ready?"
But here's the thing: while the feedback is almost always valid β most of the time, we have no idea what the other person actually means.
And to make things worse? We feel uncomfortable clarifying why.
(After all, who wants to appear dumb and imply that they can't tell what is "strategic," and what isn't?)
And so, as a result: we politely acknowledge the feedback, without really knowing what to fix.
We simply trim things down a bit, swap in some big words β and pray that the next iteration will land.
Of course, while I say we β I really mean me. Because this was my struggle for the longest time.
And it took me years before I figured out what it meant to "be more strategic" β and why there are far better ways to say it.
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Stop using the word "strategic," unless...
Let's be clear about one thing first: there's nothing wrong with recognizing that a piece of work wasn't built with a strategic lens.
But the problem with simply saying something doesn't feel strategic? It becomes a cop-out mechanism. You know that something feels "off" about a piece of work, but you can't articulate exactly why.
And our feedback fails to actually fixes the issue.
Therefore, if you're the one giving the feedback? Drop "strategic" from your vocabulary altogether.
Stop saying "it's not strategic enough." It doesn't help anyone.
And instead, ask yourself if what you really meant was:
- It's too tactical.
- It's tautological.
- It's short-sighted.
- It's ambiguous.
- It's not focused.
And in today's issue β we'll talk about what to do if you find yourself in these scenarios.
#1 Say: "It's too tactical."
What does it mean to communicate in a way that's "too tactical?" Let's illustrate with an example.
Imagine that you are a basketball expert, and your friend Bronny has asked you to build a plan to help him become a professional basketball player some day.
Let's say you've prepared an awesome plan. How do you communicate it?
Well, it turns out that the same content can be communicated very differently, and land very different outcomes.
β Because this is what an "overly tactical" plan looks like:
- Run 5KM every day
- Lift weights 3 days a week
- Make 1000 3-pointers every day
- Watch one hour of game film daily
What's wrong with this plan? Well, nothing really. For all we know, these might actually be all the right things to do.
But that's precisely the issue: it feels like a bunch of "stuff." It feels like an arbitrary set of motions and activities. It feels like the outcome of strategizing, while the rationale behind it is nowhere to be seen.
No wonder it doesn't feel "strategic" for some reason.
β But consider what a "less tactical" strategy could look like: