A Very January Meditation on Strategy and Implementation

Hello leaders, I see you. How’s your January going? After a few weeks of “what day is it” we’re back in offices trying to refocus on a new set of goals, deliverables, and plans to get us through the next four quarters. What we were thinking of as the future just a few short weeks ago we now get to think about in the present tense. With that in mind:

• How much of your team’s workload is still in a fuzzy state of funding?

• How many critical mandates are straight-up unfunded?

• How many of you have been asked to squeeze in some extra BAU (Business As Usual) or RTB (Run the Business) or operational workflows, despite the fact you have an execution plan that ALREADY assumes you can do more with less?

This is the dance, as we enter a new year, we exit a budget cycle and try to sort our what the resulting plans actually look like. I have a couple of thoughts to assist, having been through this at huge corporations as well as nimble startups, in many cases shouldering a lot of the burden of cross-organizational program plans. Let me tell you, as a yoga teacher with special training in therapeutic yoga, having some breathing exercises and somatic stress reduction techniques on tap comes in very handy heading into Q4. But we’re in Q1 now, so as you’re arriving to your offices or your zooms, let’s take a moment, take a breath, and figure out some better ways to move forward given the cards we’ve been dealt.

Moving from Strategy Brain to Execution Mindset

First thing: let’s acknowledge these planning processes are terrible. Every year, we promise we’ll start earlier, we’ll do it better. Every year, we trying a new approach to try and mitigate the thrash we get from trying to work both bottom-up and top-down simultaneously, weaponizing bloated spreadsheets in an attempt to rationalize strategy with the details of implementation.

Second thing: let’s acknowledge that planning processes are a gift. They are an opportunity for leaders to imagine a better future, and for teams to lift their heads from the daily grind and get aligned and connected on where we are going together.

• If your team is small, everybody is doing everything, but taking a long view gives folks a chance to consider their unique value-add, or at least, consider their unique learning path, and connect that to team deliverables and operations.

• If your team is bigger, folks can specialize and you can get leverage - improving not just tech, but processes. Not just driving throughput of deliverables getting completed, but unleveling quality.

It’s a gift for leaders to have a vehicle to communicate a vision, and to prioritize their team’s work. 

Strategy is Choosing

Prioritization is the essence of strategy, because strategy is not just about what we’re trying to achieve - it’s choosing also what we are not trying to achieve. In my experience, many teams hate prioritization. Partially this is because everyone wants to contribute, everyone wants to innovate, everyone wants to work on the cool, fun stuff. This is a trap, though. When everything is a high priority, you get a peanut-butter strategy with no clear coherent end state, and that lack of clarity almost always means the rest of the organization can sense that some of the investment is being wasted. Everything is not a high priority — and as hard as it is to pick This, versus That — pick a lane and drive, because it’s too dangerous to tiptoe down the middle of the road.

Now - I get it. Prioritization is really, really hard in a responsive/reactive function like cybersecurity, fraud, or trust & safety. We cannot drop the ball. We have to cover the whole threat surface and work with every risk that’s generated by our business.  When we look in one direction, we end up getting hit from another. It’s truly exhausting. It’s also why we end up loading our BAU/RTB requests - to get the minimum capabilities needed to function. But this is a red queen function - we have to keep pressing our foot on the gas pedal just to stay in the same place. Still, if we start from a place of being curious about what’s REALLY the most important, I think we end up in a better place than trying to keep all the balls in the air at all times, while not entirely clear on which balls are truly undroppable.

I also want to take a moment to consider Shiny Thing syndrome, which is not constrained to the C-Suite, sadly. Shiny Thing syndrome is problematic on a few fronts.

• A) Shiny Things affect the WHOLE business, and so if (for example, wild thought here) your company is trying to leverage LLMs this year, and there are a lot of unknowns around where this is going to crop up in your product, your production environment, or your corporate systems - this is quite a big unknown to work around as you prioritize. Can you deprioritize something coming out of the CEO or CMO’s office? No, you can’t, and we’re also watching our House of No tendencies to shoot down good business ideas from paranoid land, so Shiny Things from elsewhere show up on our front door, it’s typically risk and work that we have to factor in. 

• B) YOU are prone to Shiny Thing syndrome. I mean everyone is. But if you work in Cyber, or Fraud, or T&S (or in Tech), you yourself are being bombarded by either the newest IAM doohickey, an earth-shaking data governance easy button, a revolutionary MDR, or some Cloud PAAS SAAS SASE Wizardry. This isn’t just about tightening RFPs (although that will definitely help), the question is more what is really important, which of these features are worth the time it will take to research, procure, implement, and operate. TCO, yo.

• C) There’s true innovation out there. This is the worst part - some of the Shiny Things are really great and going to move the whole industry forward. Of course we want to get in on that.

But working our way through Shiny Thing syndrome is not just about sorting snake-oil into the right bottles, it’s about balancing that need to push the edge of innovation with truly reinforcing your own core tech - as well as people, process, and policy. The foundation is everything; without it, even the Shiniest of Shiny Things will not help.

Cool Tricks for Strategy Kids

So, after reminding you of the realities of corporate planning here’s some cool tricks that’s helped me again and again as I enter January, look at the budget and our grand plans and try to reorient to execution plans. Begin with the end in mind. And Kick Through the Target.

Let’s imagine your program update to the C-suite in Q4. What do you want to be able to say? What will impress them, reinforce their confidence in you and your team? Even better, what will impress you, what will reinvigorate you and your team, make you feel like you’ve really moved the program forward? Now, we want to temper this vision with the understanding that 4 quarters goes by quickly. But we have a rough idea of what we’re working with. The key here is to try and focus on how your message will be received. In your head, maybe the first thing that pops into your head is “we’re going to deploy this really cool bot detection technology”. 

Beginning with the end in Mind

Play it out in your mind’s eye - this is your mic drop moment. You nailed it. You delivered on-time, on-budget, and it’s working flawlessly in production. What’s the reaction? If your CMO, Head of Product, CFO and COO look blank, even in your mind’s eye, maybe you’re missing compelling metrics. What’s the impact? And follow the numbers. [Note: Even if they look ecstatic in your mind’s eye, they’ll look even happier in reality if you bring numbers.]

Of course we need to add impact - you knew that already and would never go into the C-Suite without it. “We deployed this really cool bot detection technology. We delivered 100% on-time, under-budget, with zero impact on latency in the key flows in product…and we’re flagging 80% of the bad actors in near-real time”. This is getting good, now you KICK THROUGH THE TARGET. In some places this is called the “so what” factor, but it’s so critical for subject matter experts to bring their “so what” back to the business. Keep asking yourself…and so? 

Kick Through the Target using the So What factor

“We deployed this really cool bot detection technology. We delivered 100% on-time, under-budget, with zero impact on latency in the key flows in product…and we’re flagging 80% of the bad actors in near-real time”….and so?

“We deployed this really cool bot detection technology. We delivered 100% on-time, under-budget, with zero impact on latency in the key flows in product…and we’re flagging 80% of the bad actors in near-real time, which means we’re flagging those account creations and associated transactions for early detection”…and so?

“We deployed this really cool bot detection technology. We delivered 100% on-time, under-budget, with zero impact on latency in the key flows in product…and we’re flagging 80% of the bad actors in near-real time, which means we’re flagging those account creations and associated transactions for early detection, and we’re able to decline 20% more fraud transactions at the point of sale and reduce the run rate of bad actors conducting account takeover by 40%”…and so? We’re close enough here that I recommend flipping and reversing it to something like this.

The Flip & Reverse

“We’ve made improvements allowing us to decline 20% more fraud transactions at the point of sale (for a loss avoidance of a bajillion dollars), and reducing the run rate of hijacked accounts by 40% (that’s another bajillion dollars). Oh…and…

• We did this by integrating a real-time technology into our production stack with zero impact on latency.

• We delivered on-time, on-budget - and oh by the way this also reduces ATO-related customer contacts in ops by about 10%.”

Note that we’ve kicked through the original target of Launching a Thing, and now the Thing itself takes a secondary role to the actual business improvement. Because it’s the impact that’s important, not the Launching of the Thing.

Now you’ve got a future mic drop moment in mind, we work back from there. Likely, implementing the tech is only part of the work, even though that’s the behemoth of a project you pulled through the budget process. But the point is, you need work back from the true value you want to deliver. Oh, and also make sure you have the ability to calculate those cool metrics once you’ve got the tech, process, people, and policy lined-up. But maybe that’s a meditation for another time.

Take another couple of breaths, getting really clear and refreshed by the delight of your future mic drop moment. When you’re ready, come on back to the present moment, take another breath, and get ready to jump back into your day. Enjoy your roadmapping!

Note: If you are interested in a post-budget process therapeutic yoga sesh for the team, or simply could use some help on nailing the transition from strategic vision to the right metrics suite and a roadmap, lmk.