The Toolbox

The Shape of Strategy

Ray Charles—blind since childhood—loved chess. He watched the board with his fingers and played in his mind.

Photo by Bill Ray

“If you do not develop a strategy of your own, you become a part of someone else’s strategy.”

Alvin Toffler¹

Finding a pathway

How do we find a pathway to impact?

On such a journey, you need a language. So we will begin with a definition.

Strategy is the logic we use to allocate our resources to achieve a goal.

If you have a goal, but no logic, you have only desire. If you have resources, but no logic, you have only potential. If you have logic, but no goal, you are only a machine.

The challenge is this: each one these three elements can change. You might find yourself with more resources or a new means of allocation. The context around you may change, forcing you to shift your logic. Or, as you learn more over time, you might reframe your goal.

This, then, is the fundamental paradox of strategy. At the beginning we choose a goal and imagine a pathway to that goal. But as we go through time, we will learn. Things will change. Our path will curve and split and end in ways we cannot predict.

We need the prospective clarity of an imagined pathway. But we also need the flexibility to embrace a new route to something better as we retrospectively learn.

The visual metaphor of a pathway is no accident. Social change is a journey. ...