By Dr. Rebecca Homkes
Great strategy thrives when it breaks critical tension. Strategic leaders have long balanced timeframes, focus versus adaptability, and clarity amongst uncertainty. But pressures are mounting, and new information enters faster than systems can filter it. Leaders must separate the nuances from the distracting noise to ensure they make better, faster decisions that are aligned with strategic priorities. Dr. Rebecca Homkes shares how leaders can help their teams build critical internal predictability in order to thrive in uncertain environments.
Great strategy lives at the intersection of tensions.
Strategy is a midterm articulation of value creation: straddling three-year needle movers between pursuing long-term stakeholder value and adapting to shorter-term opportunities.
Strategy is being flexible and open to new learnings but focused on articulated priorities.
Strategy is about making choices about where to compete, win, and invest. These choices demand clarity but must be made when you never know everything you would like to know.
Leaders have always operated within these tensions, but the pressure of change on the system is heightened. Daily news cycles have become hourly, with orders and announcements constantly flooding the zone of information.
As leaders, how do we incorporate the right information that will impact our strategy while filtering out the distractions?
Bringing nuance in and noise out to thrive during external uncertainty comes from building internal predictability. You have it when your team can answer yes to these five questions:
- I know our critical beliefs, and how these link to our choices
- I know what we are trying to achieve, and why it matters
- I know where critical decisions take place
- I can rely on others to do what they say they will do
- When I do adapt, it is recognized and rewarded
Beliefs form choices
The foundation of strategy is a set of prioritized, testable beliefs, as these frame your strategy choices that follow. While most teams discuss trends, high-performing teams turn these discussions into strategic dialogue by articulating their midterm beliefs. A belief implies taking a stance, and a good belief is one that can be watched or tested over time. Beliefs are critical, as we need to avoid the trap of jumping from trend to implication. For example, we see possible tariffs therefore we most stockpile inventory. This may be the appropriate choice, but knee jerk reactions are not strategy. To build your foundation, complete this sentence:
We are seeing X [this trend] and we believe Y for the midterm [your team’s belief] which means Z for us [the possible strategic implication.
As you move forward, you will get earlier feedback on whether your beliefs are tracking than your execution of priorities. As the news cycle continues, your team can view incoming information with this belief filter– is this providing more clarity on a belief, challenging it, or irrelevant noise.
Choices provide alignment
Strategies need goals. But in a growth strategy the goal has two jobs: tell us where to go and give us a structure to make decisions as we execute. With information flooding the system, it is easy to get distracted if we are lacking a finish line. So provide your team with the needed context: what is success.
Team members also need structure, which they get from boundary conditions. Boundaries provide the non-negotiables or parameters they must stay within as they execute towards the finish line.
Information that does not relate to your finish line or boundaries is noise; information that gives additional context on our journey must be brought into the discussion.
Agility in decision-making
Agility without strategy is chaos. True agility presupposes a strategy so that leaders can align day-to-day decisions with other leaders without needing oversight, micromanagement, or detailed guidance. The definition of agility is simple but critical: Agility is making good decisions quickly aligned with strategy and then resourcing them appropriately.
You can build this by better clarifying decision-making rights and ensuring these are in the right place. When lacking speed in execution, teams often blame process or bureaucracy, but it is usually more basic: they lack clarity of decision-making rights, or they are not distributed appropriately. Say new information comes in that challenges some critical beliefs, or an ideal customer makes a unique request. Team members often know a response is required, but they do not know if they can make that decision. They will freeze, say ‘hold on’ to the customer and ask their boss. Things can continue to escalate until the decision is made, but by then it will probably be too late to matter. Worse, those distributed leaders never build their decision-making capability.
In thriving organizations, decision-making rights are codified so leaders know if they are to make the decision when relevant information comes, and more critically where to route it to if not.
Reliability gives speed
Organizations are networks of commitments that extend up, down, and across the organization. The things that don’t get done are usually the things that come in from the side. When trust – our ability to rely on others to do what they say they will do – erodes, execution falters.
When reliability is high, team members are free to execute their commitments without worry or concern about others not being met. More critically, when reliability is low, we become inwardly focused – spending time escalating issues, calling alignment meetings, and endless chasing. There is critical information coming in we must address, but we are too busy following up on stuff.
In high-performing companies, high reliability enhances adaptability. These organizations can execute at speed because they have trust in commitments. When team members can trust others to do what they are supposed to, you can focus on value creation and move faster than others on identified market opportunities.
Adaptability is a capability
To achieve this last piece, change must be accounted for as a core part of execution. When leaders adapt and adjust within the boundaries of the strategy, this must be recognized and rewarded. Leaders who make fast decisions on the ground that stay within boundaries should be celebrated, especially when the plan is becoming challenged by market uncertainties. If you assume the world will change, help your leaders learn how to change and then celebrate and reward them when they do it in the market.
But not all news demands a rection, much is a distraction: internal predictability is a capability.
To have a capable team that can bring the nuance from the market into strategy and ignore the noise the key filter must be built, maintained, and rewarded of knowing:
- Does this fit within or challenge an existing belief?
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- If so, how does this affect our choices we are making as we execute towards the finish line?
- For these choices, where do critical decisions take place?
- As we execute these, can we rely on others to do what they say they will do?
- And when we do adapt- appropriately – is it recognized and rewarded
Internal predictability is powerful. Noise will continue to overwhelm strategic nuance in the eternal world over the timeframe of your strategy. Winning teams provide a capability of framing in so they can manage internal uncertainty down, so they can more effectively manage – and thrive through – external uncertainty.
Concepts have been adapted from Survive Reset Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times by Dr. Rebecca Homkes.
Dr. Rebecca Homkes 
