Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, when I was leading UK Government Communications, I had a conversation with a senior official at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
“I don’t think we’re clear on our strategy.” I said. “Who do we really need to reach with our comms and what are we trying to get them to do differently?”
“I’m completely clear,” he snapped. “We need to communicate to the public in the UK so they understand why we’re supporting Ukraine. We need to communicate to allies in Europe and the US so they maintain their support. We need to counter Russian disinformation, especially in the Global South. We need to dissuade Russia’s allies from coming to her aid. We need to maintain morale inside Ukraine. And we need to expose to the Russian people the truth of what Putin is doing in their name.”
Most people seem not to understand strategy.
The description above might have been an accurate articulation of what was desirable.
But a strategy is the opposite of wishful thinking.
Strategy, by necessity, involves choice.
It is about considering the different possible ways in which you could achieve your objectives and picking one course of action over another.
Over the last 25 years working in communications, I have seen the same strategy mistakes repeated again and again.
Sometimes a strategy is simply a list of activities the organisation is planning to undertake. This might be a plan, but it does not necessitate a strategic choice at all.
Sometime a strategy is wishful thinking. “Our strategy is to deliver the best customer communications in the UK.” To be a strategy it should say something of how you are going to achieve your goals.
Sometime the word strategy is added to activities or roles to confer importance. Rather than having a communications plan people have a “strategic communications plan” and practice “strategic communications”. But of course, all good communication should be in support of strategic goals.
Here are my top five common mistakes to avoid:
1. The everything, everywhere, all at once strategy.
I recently asked a candidate for a senior communications job what their social media platform strategy would be for the organisation:
“Well, I think you have to be everywhere, you need to be on all of them.”
It always feels easier in the short-term to keep routes open. By doing everything, you tell yourself, you will be better able to react in the moment. And besides, perhaps your boss expects you to be everywhere.
But long-term, this is a route to guaranteed failure.
In a world of limited time, budget and audience attention it is critical to choose, if you want to succeed. Your strategy must choose what you won’t do as much as choose what you will.
If your strategy does not force you to make trade-offs, then it won’t work as well as an effective strategy. And a good strategy makes it more likely that you will achieve your objective than a competitor who has not made a choice.
For example, one country’s tourism strategy might be to attract low numbers of high net worth tourists, while another country might target larger numbers of lower income tourists. Deciding that you are going to sell to a small number of people at a high margin, rather than sell to a large number of people at a low margin is a strategic choice. Both are a legitimate course of action. Both could be successful.
By making a strategic choice, you are sacrificing the option of doing one thing over another. You are choosing a way of achieving the objective (growing tourism income) so that you can marshal the resources at your disposal in a coherent way.
Strategy is about identifying the different possible approaches to achieving success, then selecting one.
2. The self-justification strategy
If you have already decided what you are going to do, then you are not developing a strategy, you are retro-fitting self-justification.
The purpose of a communications strategy is to get an audience to think, feel, or do something differently. In order to do that, you need to know something of your audience.
A strategy developed without audience insight is highly unlikely to be successful, and certainly won’t be as successful as one based on deep audience understanding.
Your strategy should absolutely start from your objectives - the outcomes you want. But it should not necessarily be based on what you want to say.
The whole purpose of developing a strategy is to work out the most effective way of using communications to get to your desired outcome. There are lots of things you can control, but how people think and are likely to respond to your actions is not one of them.
So you need to understand your audience before making strategic choices. Be prepared to test your original hypothesis and be open to the fact that the route you thought best at the outset, may not in reality be the most effective strategic choice.
Set your objectives, collect the evidence and insight, work out what it is telling you, then decide what to do - not the other way around.
3. The platitudinous truisms strategy
If your strategy is framed around meaningless phrases, “We’re going to communicate a clear and robust plan”, “enable faster delivery”, “unblock pace, innovation and ambition”, then you do not have a strategy.
The opposite of your strategy should be a legitimate course of action. Yet, no-one would say their intention was to “communicate an unclear and weak plan”.
These strategies avoid difficult choices through clever drafting. They sound dramatic, dynamic and action-oriented. But they are a paper tiger. They are easy to agree (because people can read whatever they want in them) but they are totally ineffectual as a strategy.
Strategies should explain the how as precisely as possible. For a strategy to be meaningful it generally involves not doing something else. That should almost certainly feel painful and provoke disagreement.
Don’t be tempted to minimise the disagreement by being unclear about the choice. It is better to have difficult conversations in setting a tightly defined strategy, than to put resources into a strategy that is unclear.
Clarity of strategy aligns your team. When your whole organisation understands what you’re doing and why, people make better decisions. They stay on message. They spot opportunities in the moment that will align with the plan. They have the flexibility to be creative, knowing where the boundaries for action are.
At its core, strategy is about coherence. It is the art of getting everyone and everything to point in the same direction. You can’t deliver that through woolly phrasing or thinking.
4. The shooting for the moon without a rocket strategy.
Ambition is great, but shooting for the moon when you don’t have a rocket is just setting yourself up to fail.
Your objective should be realistic and attainable.
This is not the same as it being easy. The objective should be stretching and challenging. You might not even know how you are going to achieve it. But it should be possible.
5. The Christmas tree strategy.
You’ve made your strategic choice. You have your plan. And what’s more, it’s working! Everyone can see that results are heading in the right direction. So people start saying: “if this is working for X then let’s do it for Y as well”, and “let’s ask the team to do this too”.
Like a Christmas tree, the more baubles you add to the branches the more the strain shows, until eventually the whole thing comes crashing down. Suddenly you’ve turned a good strategy right back into the everything, everywhere, all at once strategy.
Good strategy bridges the gap between ambition and action. Your strategic capacity is a combination of: the resources you have available to you; and your audiences capacity to absorb information. If either is overwhelmed then you are killing your chance of securing your outcome.
If there is more to do (and there always is) you are better going fast and hard on fewer objectives, achieving them and then moving onto the next set rather than taking on too many things at the same time.
This isn’t a lack of ambition, it is a dose of reality. It is you marshalling the resources that are available in the most effective way possible.
What good strategy looks like
In the coming weeks, I’ll explore what good strategy looks like.
What are the winning new strategies that are working for organisations in this low-trust high-change communications environment? What are the timeless strategies that have always worked and retain their value today? What are the techniques you can use that will help you develop a great strategy?
Until then, remember that strategy is about choice. It is about choosing how to get from where you are now, to where you want to be, with the resources you have available.
Let me know strategy mistakes that you have seen and any examples of good communications strategy you think I should cover in future articles.
Until then, please subscribe if you haven’t done so already and please share with other communicators who want to lead with clarity and cut through the noise.
Otherwise thanks for watching, reading or listening.
Simon
Deep Cuts:
If you’re interested in a deeper dive into strategy, I recommend Roger L Martin’s excellent substack:
