Guidance follows GOING.   — BLG

The four essential steps of strategic management are situation analysis, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and strategy evaluation.  In other words and as I explain to my business students, it is all about analyze, formulate, implement and test.  The internal acronym monster within me calls it AFIT.

With that in kind, far too often we subconsciously presume strategic management and planning to be about the first two steps… analyze and formulate.  We go on strategic retreats to reflect and ponder and examine and formulate.  I suggest we often, again unconsciously, ignore the advance in favour of the retreat.

While certainly crucial, the heart of strategic management is about implementation. It is in the doing that we see both results and/or learnings. You cannot be guided unless you move.  Guidance follows GOING.

Taking time to identify the core issue is vital. Expending time and energy on discovering strategic solutions is equally so. Still, we must take action in order to see if we are “onto something”. Even more so, we must be “all in” on the implementation of the strategy.  Otherwise, how will we know if its results were not based on some unknown X Factor from either mysterious support or sabotage or both?  More succinctly put, nothing truly strategic can happen without wholehearted action.  Only then will we realize what was right or wrong about our effort.  Only then can we properly test and then perfect.

Bottom line, as you face strategic issues and questions and as you formulate strategic alternatives and solutions, know that this is the beginning of a process; a process whose heart is in the doing; the wholehearted doing, the GOING.  In the doing we can find the answers.  You cannot be guided unless you move.  Guidance follows GOING.

It’s your move.  Advance!

Peace, passion and prosperity.

Barry Lewis Green, aka The Unity Guy™