Nearly every board meeting, committee or city hall meeting I’ve ever attended, unless it was chaired by a very skilled individual, vacillated between strategy and tactics. They were all over the place! This lack of clarity causes many organisations to never really decide on anything.
A simple equation that clarifies this situation is:
A strategy is WHAT TO DO…… Tactics are HOW TO ACHIEVE IT.
So, are you talking about What you want to achieve or How you want to do it?
This is important because there is a huge difference in starting points.
One is Strategic the other is Tactical.
The cause of the problem is, you can’t decide on tactics until you decide what you want to do.
As an example, say you wanted to grow sales by 25%. So, you start discussing the various options:
- Focus on new product sales.
- Develop existing customer spend.
- Focus on new business sector opportunities.
Then someone says, “we could run a series of exhibitions for the new products.” And there you go moving off course, straight into tactics before you have decided on the most appropriate strategy.
Too often in management meetings, the line between strategy and tactics get confused.
So, the next time you’re in the boardroom, make your time much more effective by deciding if it’s WHAT or HOW you are deciding on.
This simple but powerful shift can see your meeting pace and productivity soar.
