Playing To Win
Training a Novice Strategist
Unlearning & Relearning
A reader asked a question about how to train novice strategists. I have done a whole lot of that with young Monitor consultants, with Rotman students, and with folks in strategy departments at my clients. So, I thought it would tackle this question to help novice strategists and the mentors responsible for their training in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece called Training a Novice Strategist: Unlearning & Relearning. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
From-To Categories
When I think of the training regimen of a novice strategist, I think as much about unlearning as I do about learning. Young strategists have already been taught many things that they need to unlearn. I see four categories across which they need to unlearn something they have been taught to open up mental space to learn something that they need to know to be a productive strategist. Think of the categories in terms of ‘from-to.’
1) From Formulating Strategy to Facilitating Strategy
Young strategists — whether consultants or in-house — are routinely taught that their job is to create strategy. But it isn’t their job. It is the job of line managers to make strategy choices. If they don’t, line managers should be fired because they aren’t performing their most important task. I have been working in strategy for over four decades and I have never seen a situation featuring a successful strategy created by a non-line manager. I am not arguing that such a thing ever happens, just that if it does, it is exceedingly rare.
As I have argued before in this series, the proper job of strategists is to facilitate the process by which their line managers make strategy choices. If these strategists are good at their job, line managers strategy choices will be better than they would have otherwise been — and that is extremely valuable.
However, how strategists can do this — and do it well — is just not taught. What are taught — and taught extensively — are the many analytical frameworks for creating strategy. So, strategists tend to spend most of their time and effort on using their frameworks to create strategy — believing that will carry the day.
Instead, novice strategists need to be taught to spend as much or more of their time on structuring and facilitating the strategy conversation as on creating strategic content. Presentations should be less about transmitting data and analysis, and more about structuring a strategic conversation for line managers.
To enable them, novice consultants need to be taught the principles for structuring a useful dialogue, how to help a conversation along, how to make participants feel comfortable sharing their ideas to get the most out of the ideas of the management team that is going to make the strategy choices.
They need to learn how to balance advocacy of their own point of view with inquiry into the view of others. Don’t declare: This is the strategy choice we should make. (pure advocacy) Don’t ask: Why do you think that? (pure inquiry) Instead say: I think you are saying x, if I am right, I would like to hear more about your reasoning behind that view. That productive combination of advocacy and inquiry encourages participants to share their reasoning without fearing they will be attacked for doing so.
Make young consultants practice facilitating within their own team, role-playing the real conversation. Give them feedback and get them to practice giving each other feedback. After real meetings, spend as much time debriefing on the quality of the conversation as on the content. Relentlessly build the novice strategist’s facilitation skills.
2) From Getting Buy-In to Generating Internal Commitment
Young strategists are taught the dominant view of strategy as a two-step process: 1) get the right answer; and then 2) get buy-in for it. But it violates the golden rule. Pretty much everyone hates being bought-in — i.e. to be badgered into accepting a conclusion that they were not a part of creating. But the very same people engage in the buy-in of others. That is, they do to others what they hate having done to themselves.
Teach novice strategies to stop doing it — as I have argued earlier in this series. Setting yourself up for needing to engage in buy-in activities is inefficient and ineffective. Instead, everyone who needs to decide to agree with a strategy conclusion, also needs to be part of generating that conclusion. That is internal commitment, not buy-in.
That doesn’t imply everyone in the organization needs to be involved in every choice. Some do need to be involved because a great decision can’t be made without their input. Others simply need to be informed of the decision — but given the task of making the next level of choices. That is strategic choice chartering, which helps everyone in the organization to make the choices — and only those choices — for which they are best equipped in the organization to make. People only need buy-in when they are told their only job is to ‘execute’ the choices made above them.
The process for creating strategy must be designed for internal commitment and young strategists need to develop skills in generating internal commitment. They need to be taught how to think ahead to potential action happening and determine in advance who needs to be involved in designing the action to be taken. And they need to practice how to help line managers charter the next level of choices below them. Critique their logic and share how you would do it. Keep giving them practice and feedback until they get proficient at generating productive internal commitment to strategy choices.
3) From Crunching Data to Clarifying Logic
Novice strategists are taught that strategy is primarily about crunching the data. It is a myth perpetrated by business schools and the modern world of business, as I have argued earlier in this series. Instead, strategy is primarily about logic — in particular, logical arguments about the future. As explained by Aristotle’s theories, and covered earlier in this series, strategy involves imagining possibilities and choosing the one for which the most compelling logical argument can be made. It is definitively not about crunching the data and doing what ‘the data says.’
Young strategists must learn how to explore the logic of strategy choices. To do so, they need to become skilled in using the What Would Have to be True (WWHTBT) tool to reverse-engineer the logic of strategy choices. This is an important skill because many managers who recommend a given choice haven’t even laid out the entire logic of the choice in their own mind. Often, I need to reverse-engineer the logic that must lie behind the current enacted choice because no member of the management team can provide its logic. Line managers need help in reverse-engineering the logic of the existing strategy and the alternative strategy possibilities to enable them to discern which has the most compelling logic
Novices should practice reverse-engineering whatever strategy they can find — strategies of competitors, strategies of famous companies, strategies that colleagues come up with in their work — any strategy. If they practice extensively off-line, they can get themselves ready to work with a live strategy team to get its members to lay out the WWHTBT for the strategy possibilities that they generate. Keep critiquing young consultants and giving them feedback because there is a long learning curve to getting proficient at this skill.
4) From Applying Dueling Frameworks to Building an Agglomerative Model
Novice strategists tend to have been taught an entire toolbox of frameworks — as is the case for every discipline in business. And often, as it certainly is in the strategy discipline, it is multiple frameworks — blue ocean strategy, five forces, generic strategies, disruptive innovation, business model canvas, and so on. The models have no intent to have logical consistency across them, nor is there taught an integration across them. As a result, novice strategists tend to pick one of them based on the particular features of their immediate context and apply it. They can’t be good strategists bouncing from model to model — or even choosing one and ignoring all others.
The route to becoming a great strategist is to grow your own personalized model over time — to build a model that is an integrated agglomeration of models. You will reject some models as inconsistent and unhelpful and integrate pieces of others. That is what I have done. I started out with a Porter-dominated approach (and will always appreciate the wisdom of friend and colleague, Michael) but have since integrated aspects of the models of Chris Argyris, Jim March, Charles Sanders Peirce, Aristotle, Karl Popper, and Peter Drucker — and am working on integrating aspects of Martin Heidegger (in my work with ReD Associates).
Of course, a novice strategist must start out with a simple model. I certainly did. But rather than bouncing between unintegrated dueling frameworks, they should be encouraged to work on the harder challenge of building an ever richer and sophisticated model that agglomerates pieces of and insights from other models. Take what productively builds and ignore what does not.
When you are training novice strategists, don’t let them bounce from model to model — Oh, we should use innovation theory on this and business model canvas on that. I enforced a rule on my case team members when I was a Monitor director: one presentation, one model (with a tip of the hat to One riot, One Ranger). Having a presentation feature two (or more) conceptual frameworks that we hadn’t figured out how to integrate, and thus forced the client to perform the integration, was lazy and the abdication of our responsibility. So, if we felt the need to add a second (or more) model(s), it was our job to figure out how to integrate them into a single model. It was hard work for the novice strategists, but it gave them important practice on agglomerating models.
Give them similar practice. The goal is an ever strengthening, ever deepening model that can help novice strategists become ever more valuable in their work on strategy. This is the work of a lifetime. Novice strategists need to be encouraged to get started on that work if they are ever going to be great.
Practitioner Insights
As I have argued many times, there are no great ‘natural strategists.’ They all get there through practice. Line managers have to practice. AG Lafley practiced throughout his whole career and got phenomenally good at strategy.
Line managers make the strategy choices. As a strategist, the first thing you have to understand is that your job is different. It is to help line managers make great strategy choices.
Hopefully if you are a novice strategist, you can get someone to train you. A great trainer will take data crunching, answer providers, who deploy the framework de jour and spend lots of time badgering people to buy into their answers, and help them become great facilitators who help surface great ideas, involve the right people, pressure test the logic using a rich model, and bring line managers to great strategy solutions.
You are going to have to practice yourself if you don’t have someone to coach you. Practice facilitating strategy. Practice unearthing the logic of strategy by asking “can you help me understand your thinking behind that choice.” Internalize the implication of the golden rule by refusing to engage in buy-in, rather seeking to generate internal commitment. And see your lifelong task as building an ever richer, ever more sophisticated model for engaging in your craft.
And I dearly hope that the Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights series helps you on that journey!
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As a reminder, I previewed in January 2025 that I am doing a PTW/PI podcast series with friend Tiffani Bova. The fifth in the series will be on LinkedIn here on Wednesday, May 7th at 12 noon EST and 9am PST. Look forward to seeing you there!
