Recently,
I was asked to
help a driver navigate
to a friend’s house.
The first thing I asked was…
where are we currently?
It sounds like a no-brainer
but when setting strategy,
many leaders forget to ask this question.
Richard Rumelt
talks about how important
it is to diagnose
the current situation
before coming up with solutions.
“A good strategy has,
at a minimum,
three essential components:
a diagnosis of the situation,
the choice of an overall guiding policy,
and the design of coherent action.
Many attempts at strategy
lack a good diagnosis.
At the star of most consulting engagements,
the client wants an appraisal
of a particular course of action
or wants advice on what to do.
I almost always back up
and try to create a better diagnosis
of the situation
before getting into recommendations.”
If you don’t know where you currently are,
you can’t figure out
how to get where you want to go.