Leading Through Uncertainty
A field guide for leading with clarity and conviction
Over the last few years at Mess Hill, we continue to encounter two interrelated scenarios:
A leader who is tasked with navigating near-constant change and has found themselves stuck reacting to present challenges, with no clear vision of what’s ahead or the capacity to lift their gaze
A leadership team with great intentions but misaligned perspectives, running endless strategic planning cycles in an effort to create shared clarity
Both of these scenarios make perfect sense. We’re living through a period of great technological, social, and political transformation. And in times of great change, it’s normal to react with short-term thinking—to focus on what’s right in front of you, what can be fixed immediately, or what feels within your control.
But right now, we really need leaders who have a point of view on where they want to go long-term, not just through the next strategic planning cycle. We need leaders who can envision the broader terrain and bravely make choices about where to focus.
In this moment, we need leaders who understand what great strategy is, and are capable of building, leveraging, and adapting strategy.
It’s probably no surprise that we have some *thoughts* about how to do the above. In our roles as strategy guides, we have the ongoing benefit of facilitating, experiencing, and observing strategy approaches across organizations, sectors, industries, and dynamics. This position has enabled us to see how common it is for a team to need a shared concept of strategy—and a place to start.
So last fall, we put together a Strategy Field Guide. It includes our perspective on what strategy is (and, importantly, what it isn’t), why it feels like such a struggle right now, how to recognize if it’s needed, and six specific methods for practicing it.
It walks readers through a deceptively simple definition (spoiler: we believe a strategy is a hypothesis) and challenges some of the assumptions leaders often make when taking on strategy development in times of change.
Importantly, it includes a guide to a set of real practices that help teams arrive at clear strategies they can feel confident about pursuing, learning about, and adapting.
If you could use a strategy pep talk, some clear language to articulate what might be missing in your organization, or if you simply nerd out on strategy like we do, make your way to the field guide, which has a permanent home on our site.
Strategy can feel overwhelming, especially amidst all the work going into maintaining today’s business. But with the right methods and mindsets, we find that it can be fulfilling, satisfying, and honestly pretty delightful.
If you need a partner to work through a strategy with you or you have thoughts about the field guide that you’d like to share with us, please get in touch.