If You Want Your Business To Succeed, Adopt This Strategy

Most business strategies are doomed to fail.

“How do you feel the meeting went? Do you think we have a good plan?” a leader of my company asked me.

I remarked, “it sounds great right now, but there’s still a lot of unknowns. We won’t know until we start to test and improve what we believe to be true. How we execute this strategy will be different a few weeks from now, and that’s how it should be.”

Nothing is ever as it seems. You can plan yourself to death, but reality will always serve you a different treat.

Plans are a guide, not a definitive map to a successful outcome.

What matters is your ability to identify an Emergent Strategy.

An emergent strategy is when a successful outcome is achieved not by the original plan but by something that has emerged as a strategy from trial and error.

Early versions of a strategy are bound to fail. They’ll be tested against reality, and reality will win. Businesses that are growing, experimenting, and just starting never have a proven strategy that ends up successful.

Plans change once you start executing. As you execute, it “informs and transforms the plan itself,” David Finkel writes.