Define your plan. Determine the tactics that will help you achieve your strategic goal. What are the next steps and the steps down the road? Who does what? And how will you measure success along the way? Know that tactics may change even as your strategic interests remain constant.
Challenge yourself. Hold your plan or proposal up to the light and look for holes. Play out different scenarios. What haven’t you thought of? What can go wrong? Can you explain and defend the strategy with facts, or is emotion driving you? Force yourself to stop and ask about options and alternatives.
Define success. Can you explain what success looks like? How will you know it when you achieve it? What will it take and at what cost?
A Strategic Approach
Before the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation committed time and resources to the global fight against malaria, it posed a set of demanding questions to assess the dimension of the challenge. The foundation had published the “Strategy Lifecycle” as a sort of handbook of strategic questioning. The guide could serve as a template for just about any big decision, or campaign.
The Strategy Lifecycle posed a series of questions organized in three phases: Lookback and Scoping, Strategy Choice, and Execution Plan. “Look Back” and “Scoping” questions sought to learn from previous experiences and to define the history and dimensions of the issue.
What are the lessons from prior strategies and implications for our future work?
What is the nature of the problem?
What are the most promising ways to address the problem?
Strategy Choice questions got specific, tied directly to the challenge and what was needed to accomplish the mission.
How do we think change will happen?
What will we do and not do? Why? What are the trade-offs?
What is the role of our partners?
What are the financial requirements?
How will we measure our results?
What are the risks?
The answers to these questions helped set the parameters of the undertaking, and they exposed the risks. The team then asked how and what it would take to achieve the defined goals.
What is the timing and sequencing of initiatives?
What resources are needed?
The foundation’s strategic questions helped clarify decision-making and provide coherence to a campaign that pitted ambitious ideas against a formidable foe. The Gates Foundation launched its campaign and became a transformational leader in the fight against malaria. It spent billions of dollars to create new partnerships, launch massive public health campaigns, distribute insecticide-treated bed nets, and fund indoor spraying, more rapid diagnostic tests, more accessible treatments therapies, and a lot of research into improved medication. It helped turn the corner on malaria, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report 2014 estimated that malaria mortality rates had decreased by 47 percent globally and 54 percent in Africa since 2000. Researchers reported progress on a number of other fronts, including single-dose treatments and, possibly, a vaccine that would prevent the disease altogether. Optimists believe the disease can be eradicated by 2030.
A General’s Command
Strategic questions deepen understanding and clarify objectives. By asking more, you set benchmarks and assess risk. You examine opportunities and expose vulnerabilities. You become a better thinker and a smarter leader. You avoid the constraints of near-term distractions and stay focused on the essential, long-term goals. To dig into strategic questioning with someone who has done it for a living, I crossed the river to Virginia to pay a visit to General Colin Powell.
Headquartered in a nondescript office building just off the George Washington Parkway, the general still had the bearing of a military man. Taut and trim, he looked much younger than his seventy-odd years. He greeted me warmly with a big smile and an outstretched hand. I wanted to learn about his version of the strategy lifecycle—how he had brought military discipline together with intellectual curiosity to clarify the mission and set strategy at a time of war when the stakes couldn’t be higher. I wanted to know how this retired four-star general had used questions to define and execute a mission. I wanted him to explain success. And failure.
I had first met Colin Powell when we were both much younger. He was a rising star and had just been named President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser. He took the job in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal, an unmitigated disaster that threatened the Reagan presidency. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and others had hatched a secret scheme, run out of the White House, to sell arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages and funnel the profits to anticommunist guerrillas in Nicaragua. The convoluted mission violated U.S. laws as well as the president’s solemn pledge never to negotiate with terrorists. It was a mess.
I was a young White House correspondent with an untested news organization called CNN. I became consumed by the story and the deepening scandal—following every move of the independent counsel, months of congressional hearings, and leaks from sources trying to influence public opinion and the investigation itself. The scandal ruined careers and tarnished the Reagan presidency. Several senior officials resigned or were thrown overboard.
Reluctantly, President Reagan finally acknowledged, “Mistakes were made.”
Powell was a calming influence. He was brought in to help repair the severely damaged ship of state. He stayed above the chaos and proved adept at managing it. I remember his first White House briefings. His unflappable demeanor and disarming ability to pivot from tough guy to humorous answer man established him as a confident and credible power player. His direct, sometimes playful relationship with the media made him a go-to person for a comment or quote.
Everybody, it seemed, respected Colin Powell. He would serve three other presidents—George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, breaking barriers as the first African American in some of the most influential roles in the U.S. government.
When I visited his office all these years later, Powell’s roles in government service long finished, I was struck by its modesty. The picture windows looked out on the GW Parkway, not on the grand avenues or monuments of Washington that so many crave in order to assert their place in history. Inside, there was no wall of fame heavy with pictures of Powell in uniform or alongside world leaders, no reminders of famous battles or personal glory that are so common in the offices of “formers” across this power town. The most prominent object was parked next to Powell’s desk: a bright red Radio Flyer wagon, the symbol of America’s Promise, the youth organization Powell founded nearly twenty years before.
Colin Powell was a key player in America’s two wars against Iraq. In the first, he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the principal military adviser to President George H. W. Bush. In the second, he was secretary of state, the top diplomat in the cabinet serving President George W. Bush. Powell was not the principal architect or the leading voice in either war—there were many other forces and personalities at work in both—but he played significant roles. The questions he asked—and did not ask—stand as examples of how strategic questioning can shape decision-making at a time of crisis.
Powell explained that his approach to strategic questioning was honed through his military training. During his student days in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) he learned to start with a rapid and accurate “estimate of the situation,” so he would know what he was up against. Suppose there’s a hill to be taken, Powell said, the first thing the young infantry officer or the old corps commander needs to do is ask: