tip of the week: A strategy framework you can do in your head

One thing that founders of unicorns and founders of bootstrapping have in common?

They have to make 100 decisions a day and trust others to make another 100 decisions a day. A framework I use and teach can be done in your head and used to guide conversations and meetings.

STRATEGY IS 1/2 INTUITION & 1/2 ANALYSIS

Strategy is ½ intuition and ½ analysis.

Both are crucial because each does a job the other can't.

Intuition allows you to take a holistic view of the situation and generate genuinely original and unpredictable ways of tackling it.

• Analysis allows you to check your intuition against basic facts and prevents you from making stupid errors or falling in love with your nonsense.

Unfortunately, you typically see people majoring in one or the other, but rarely both. This holds us back from making the quick decisions that are a part of the daily life of a startup.

So how do we do both?

With this simple 3-step system:

1. Slow down and Gather

2. Zoom out

3. Zoom in

Let's break it down.

1. Slow Down and Gather

It is surprising how much information you know and experience you have to inform a decision once you slow down to think about it. When we are rushed or thinking about multiple things at once, we accept what is in the front of our minds as the primary facts, creating a dangerous bias.

• Take a minute, and get a drink of water. Do whatever to slow down. Then ask yourself:

• What is a fact, assumption, or secondhand, and how can I clarify?

• What are the facts that led up to this decision? Was there a different road to explore?

• Is there a similar situation to pull from?

  I have seen this one step change a narrow-minded decision into a strategic one.

2. ZOOM OUT

Next comes the intuition part of the process. You step back from the information you gathered and let your gut take over.

• What jumps out at you?

• Where does your curiosity lead you?

• What are your snap judgments?

• What feels right?

• What feels surprising?

• What makes you say, "This just feels right?"
  
  Think about it, pull someone aside, and discuss it. Relax into it. This is how breakthroughs emerge, and when they do, you'll know it because your reaction will be something like: "Huh, that was right in front of my face; why didn't I think about it."
  

3. Zoom in - now comes analysis

This is where you stress test your intuitions against the facts. Are these ideas robust somehow, or were you just attracted to them for random personal reasons?

• Do they align with the data we have? Or, at the very least, does the data not contradict them? What evidence can we find for their effectiveness? Can we do some research to validate or invalidate them?

• This is the analysis job. Not to create ideas (as many people attempt to do) but to shape and strengthen them.
  

Ultimately, we all have our biases in this game. Some of us are naturally intuitive, some are naturally analytical, and we tend to dismiss the opposite side of the process.

We want to call on all our gifts, powers, and abilities to get the best result.

Otherwise, we're operating with one-half of our brains tied behind our backs.

So now you know how to do it!

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