Aristotle and Strategic Planning

Last week, I spent an hour with a client who was having a difficult time reconciling the strategic plan that had been developed a year or two earlier with the realities the firm had encountered over the ensuing period.  He didn’t want to redo the plan. Instead, he was struggling to gain clarity over how the plan would help fulfill the vision and how he could do a better job of using the plan to lead his team inspirationally towards that vision.

This is absolutely one of the questions we as leaders should be asking ourselves about our plans.  “How can I be more clear about where I want the organization to go?!”  Plans are not static.  They are as dynamic as the world around us and the business environment we operate in. Questioning our answers regularly is not unhealthy.

WHY STRATEGIC PLANNING

According to Mark Rhodes in his article “Choosing the Words of Strategy, the value of strategy has just such a direction setting and clarifying purpose.  Without a guiding idea however, there can be no real sense of direction.  What are ideas if not the province of inspiration born of engagement and collaboration? This is why Aristotle instructs the strategist to master the art of the metaphor.  Stay with me now and don’t assume this is going to get esoteric.  It won’t.  There is a relevant point.

According to him, it is “a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.” Effective strategic thinkers display openness to new and different ideas, and one way to generate ideas is through the use of metaphor, or its close relative analogy, perhaps the most advanced form of human thinking.

In a wonderfully insightful book called An Alchemy of Mind, Diane Ackerman says that “Metaphor is one of the brain’s favorite ways of understanding the ‘this and that’ of our surroundings, and reminds us that we discover the world by engaging it and seeing what happens next.  The art of the brain is to find what seemingly unrelated things may have in common, and be able to apply that insight to something else it urgently needs to unpuzzle.”  This is a very powerful notion.

COMMUNICATION MATTERS

It matters not whether a strategy sets the direction for your life or the vision and mission of your company. It must articulate and clarify the intended direction.  To accomplish your goals, people must want to follow where you lead and to do that one must lean heavily on communication.  Communication then is at the core of a well-crafted strategy.

So, like my client, if your strategy has faltered or you think the luster has come off its original shine, don’t be so quick to scrap the hard work you once put in.  Step back and consider how you might frame the plan within the context of its vision using the power of metaphor and analogy.

It may simply be a matter of rallying focus around a story that helps make better sense of why we’re doing this in the first place.