I’ve made a mistake when putting together a strategy for my own organization. In fact, I’ve made the same mistake not once, but twice.
I started out strong. I had a clearly defined vision. I knew what assumptions my team and I were making. I knew who our potential collaborators and competitors were. I made sure that I knew everything we were going to be aiming toward and as much as possible about what we might be up against before I started to consider what actions we would take. That’s fantastic!
So I did it right, and I waited until nearly the end of the strategizing process before I listed out the actions we were going to take.
Then I messed up. How?
I numbered my actions list.
Big mistake. Here’s why:
Our brains know that numbers are sequential. Therefore, our brains look at a numbered list of actions and think, “Okay, action number one is this, action number two is this,” and continue right on down the line.
But when we’re developing a strategy and we’re figuring out what actions we want to try, we don’t actually know the sequence for them. When we brainstorm all the possible things we could do to move toward our goal, we just toss them onto the page.
What’s more, it’s likely that we’ll need to be taking multiple actions simultaneously.
So my team and I took our first strategic action and through that discovered that three or four of the actions we had listed were now unnecessary. We took another action and then added five or six more to the list that we hadn’t thought of before. Our list of actions grew longer, but at the same time we no longer had actions number eight, nine, or twelve. Plus, we realized we were taking action number one, action number seven, and action number twenty-three at the same time.
But numbering our list put the actions in sequence. Our brains wanted to do number one, then number two, then number three. And some of our brains wanted to finish number one before starting number two, and finish number two before starting number three.
Don’t make the same mistake I did (twice).
When you’re writing out the actions that you’re going to take—the projects you’ll start, the people you’re going to contact, the products you’re going to launch—write them out using bullet points, not numbers.
This post was written by Amie Pilla without the use of AI.
Copyright Amie Pilla, 2024, All Rights Reserved.
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