We all have goals. In both our work, and home life. And one of the key elements that will determine whether you reach your goals, is a strategy. In an increasingly hectic and fast moving world, with more and more complex problems, this is becoming harder than ever to achieve. One simple approach to ensuring you take a strategic approach to any situation, is OST. This is a principle created by Alastair Campbell and I first heard him talk about it on the High Performance (Ep 87.) It is further defined in his excellent book Winners: And How They Succeed.
OST stands for Objective. Strategy. Tactics. And the principle is simple.
For any complex problem, you firstly need to understand what is your Objective. This sounds simple, but think back: how many times have you walked out of a meeting without a clear view of what was agreed or a different opinion than your colleague? Only when you fully understand you objective, can you then define your Strategy. This is the critical thinking that will shape and define how you will achieve that outcome? Finally, you have Tactics. These are the low-level actions, the effort, that will achieve your results.
Let’s take a simple example of a football owner and the strategy they need to succeed. Firstly, we need to understand the Objective. If the objective was to win the Champions League, then the strategy could be to hire Pep Guardiola and give him £500m. The tactics would be the training and formation deployed in the games – low-level details that the owner doesn’t necessarily need to care about. But let’s say the objective was just to stay in the premier league. Then the strategy would be vastly different. The owner might stay with the current manager and provide him a more modest £75m to spend in the transfer market. The managers tactical decisions would also be different, but again, of little interest to our imaginary owner.
The real key is that you must understand what your objective is. Without this, it is impossible to define your strategy. Too often people forget this and jump immediately to defining a strategy without a clear definition of what they want to achieve.
Let’s bring this to life. I work in an enterprise organisation driving transformation change to our tools and systems. When I started there was a program of work focussed on creating a digital ordering system to replace a number of excel sheets. It had been running for a couple of years and at the point I started, there were about 25% of orders going through the tool. The team were working incredibly hard, but their effort was split between two distinct business functions: one that was interested in onboarding more products to the tool and one that was operationally using the tool. When I asked what our objective was, there was no clear answer. It was impossible to prioritise work. Lots of tactical effort – but no strategic direction.
So we took a step back. We broke down the issues and defined two clear options that we could present to the leadership team: do you want to improve the tool? Or do you want to get 100% of orders going through it? And we got an answer: improve the tool. Here was our objective – a clear simple target that we could now apply a strategic approach to achieving. We agreed kpi’s. Clear measurements for success. We prioritised features that would support our objective. Our team now had a purpose. Their tactical effort driving towards a common goal.
This simple shift changed a hard-working team, into a high- performing team.
Over the next 12 months we reduced the time it took to validate our orders (a key metric) by over 70%. All of this by agreeing our objective and applying strategic thinking.
So the next time you are in a meeting and talking through a complex problem, remember OST. Ask yourself: what’s the objective? What do we want to achieve? Only then, when it is absolutely clear to everyone in the room, can you move on to creating a successful strategy and have confidence that your tactical effort will be rewarded.
