🕸The Micro-verse of Strategy
The strategy of shopping for food
This Ain’t It
Ahhh, strategy. Everyone likes it.
It evokes images of successful people standing or sitting, with a Mona Lisa smile on their face. They know “THE STRATEGY”. They are strategic.
Spaceships go into space, companies triple their valuations, revenues double overnight — all thanks to strategy.
But why do strategy conversations always end up being very abstract, very fast? Why do they go directly into the plans zone so often? Sometimes, “goals” are pinned as “strategy”. Sometimes, “the vision” is used as “strategy”.
Often we can’t even agree on what we’re talking about, much less agree on what strategy is. Certainly even less can we agree on what THE strategy should be.
There are layers to the onion.
Strategic Shopping
I like examples, so I’ll use one to work through how many more layers there can be within something that we all probably do at least once every few weeks: grocery shopping.
Grocery shopping has a goal, and for many it is to complete shopping successfully, buying all the items you need.
There are already multiple things to consider right at the start here:
the place you’re going to;
the time of day and day of week you’re going there;
who comes with you;
how much food you’re buying.
Immediately you can see that these decisions do not live in a vacuum.
For instance, your decision about where to go shopping may or may not change considering what time of day or day of the week you decide to go.
Your frequency of shopping determines the amount of food you’re going to buy, which may also influence the decision of where to go.
One thing that is immediately helpful to know (and why tools like Wardley Mapping are good at this) is that your strategy decisions form a sort of a web, with decision vectors connecting and influencing each other in various ways. You’re balancing on the web, making sure it doesn’t break.
Ok, enough abstraction!
Known/Unknown Parameters
Your goal is to complete shopping successfully, and that might mean many things to you.
Is it to buy everything on the list, no matter the price?
Buy as much as you can within the budget?
Spend as long as you need, or do it in less than 20 minutes?
These parameters can be known, and they are often defined.
You can make a call to limit yourself, or add slack and keep your choices open to avoid decision paralysis, and enable other choices.
PONDER: How much of this is in your hands, and can be known, in more complex environments?
Solutions are positions
You need to know what to buy, at least. So you need some list.
You have a choice again:
Keep it in your head?
Record on paper?
Write in an app?
Keeping it in your head means your list will be limited by your working memory.
Paper will require a pen.
App will require you to adjust your phone’s FaceID settings because you might be wearing a mask in store these days.
All choices, all small strategies.
PONDER: Are these choices clear cut in your domain? What do you do to refine these choices?
Complexity & The Marginal Return on New Actors
In the case of your shopping, you’re the one actor who controls the formulation and implementation of your strategy. Yeah, there are Non-Playing Characters in this story, but you’re largely the master of your fate as you place the bok choy into the shopping cart.
It is never so simple in other domains.
Each new actor can increase the complexity of the web exponentially, in return for improved capability. Sometimes the capability improvement will be exponential, but more often it will be linear. Or worse, null.
PONDER: Who are the actors, what do they add, and are there too many?
Heuristics & Ruin
You go shopping often.
You will likely go shopping again.
Your choices now have a low chance of ruining your life, or affecting your future choices.
Not always the case in every domain (though few choices are truly ruinous).
PONDER: What is ruin? What choices can truly ruin you?
What about the fact that you make these choices often and can now rely on a few heuristics and persistent choices?
You can have the one place and time you go shopping that is optimal for you.
You use the same method for recording your grocery list that works well.
Notice I didn’t even touch the adjacent strategies of what food to buy, that connects to your other life goals like losing weight — for fear of exploding the complexity of this simple example. Suppose you buy the same food all the time.
You almost never get the chance to repeat the same thing in many other environments.
Almost always it’s like you’re a student, who flew out of the family nest and goes shopping for groceries for the first time.
Everything — for the first time.
Plus whatever heuristics you collect in this manner may create more problems than solve things.
PONDER: What is like the other thing you did elsewhere? What baggage from your past is more harm than help?
The End?
So here we are.
Did we make it work with what we had?
Did we even have time to plan? Or were we forced to act within the circumstances we were in, with the best tools at our hands?
A message to everyone (myself included, and especially people in product): Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s not meant to be easy.
Even grocery shopping can be done poorly and that’s not a reason not to do it, but also not a reason to doubt or shame yourself. One step at a time.
Hope this was helpful.
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Some great resources that inspire this: