Crafting Engineering Strategy

Chapter 7. Diagnosis

Once you’ve written your strategy’s exploration, the next step is working on its diagnosis. Diagnosis is about understanding the constraints and challenges your strategy needs to address. In particular, it’s about slowing yourself down from jumping to solutions before fully understanding the nuances and constraints of the problem.

You may find yourself wanting to skip the diagnosis phase—let’s get to the solution already! So it’s worth acknowledging that every strategy that I’ve seen fail did so due to a lazy or inaccurate diagnosis. It’s very challenging to fail once you have a proper diagnosis, and it’s almost impossible to succeed without one.

This chapter will cover:

• Why diagnosis forms the foundation of an effective strategy and effective policies depend upon it

• Why skipping the diagnosis phase consistently ruins strategies

• How to diagnose your strategy’s circumstances, step by step

• How to incorporate data into your diagnosis effectively

• Where to focus on adding data

• How to deal with controversial elements of your diagnosis, such as pointing out that your own executive is one of the challenges

• Why it’s more effective to view difficulties as part of the problem to be solved than as obstacles blocking forward progress

• Why humility and self-awareness are crucial to making an effective diagnosis

Into the details we go!

Diagnosis Is Strategy’s Foundation

One of the challenges in evaluating strategy is that, after the fact, many effective ...