This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

by Seth Godin

When organizations large and small ask me about marketing problems, I often respond by saying, “you probably need a strategy first.” But what’s that? Strategy is difficult to see and not easy to talk about, because it happens over time.

To find a better strategy, we need to be prepared to walk away from the one we’ve defaulted into.

Who will we become, who will we be of service to, and who will they help others to become This is strategy.

A strategy isn’t a map—it’s a compass. Strategy is a better plan. It’s the hard work of choosing what to do today to make tomorrow better.

Time, because strategy plays out over time in the way a garden grows. Games, because there are multiple players and different possible outcomes. Trees compete for light and only one grows to be the tallest, but all of them are part of the forest. Empathy, because people don’t see what you see or even want what you want. Plant your seeds in places where the conditions are right. And Systems, because whenever we work together, a system is created. And that system often lasts far longer than we expect. The swamp isn’t the same as the plains, but each is a complex web of interactions. Each builds on the next in a never-ending braid.

Once our basic needs for food, shelter and health are met, most people dance with three conflicting desires: • Affiliation • Status • Freedom from fear

If you want to understand why someone makes a choice, look for what people actually want, not only the proxies and substitutes they say they want.

Don’t surrender your agency and revert to the numbing day-to-day grind of compliance. You can make things better.

Elegance is simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness. It’s not only a solution that gets a result. It’s arguably a better solution—the least complex and clearest way forward.

Elegant strategies use systems. Even when they set out to change the system, they don’t fight it directly but use the system as a tool to change the system.

Systems respond to strategies, and elegant strategies give us leverage. Three things to focus on: • The strategy gets better as you grow. Anyone can sprint, but elegant strategies are something that you can maintain. • Systemic advantage defeats heroic effort. Heroic effort is thrilling, but long-term elegant strategies rarely require miracles on a daily basis. • They’re simple to explain and difficult to stick to. Over time, the pressures to vary from the elegant strategy increases—a thousand little compromises that eventually lead to mediocrity.

How did our culture evolve to have systems at the center of so much of what we do? There are three reasons: Coordinated human effort creates productivity and value. When we work together, we get far more done. A doctor without drugs, hospitals, or a team isn’t very effective. And a farmer can’t feed anyone without tools, markets, and seeds. People are rarely rational. Even when we want the same things, we don’t always agree about how to get them. Systems adjudicate these disagreements and allow us to move forward even if we’re not in sync. Consistency is worthwhile, and slack and persistence of information permit this. If someone doesn’t show up for their shift, or isn’t operating at full speed, the system acts as a bridge. The power and leverage that systems create can also cause them to create undesirable side effects and impede useful innovation.

Stewart Brand points out that if you look at a map of Boston from 1924 and compare it to one from 2024, almost every building has changed over the last century. And yet few of the major roadways have. It’s far easier to renovate or replace a building than it is to reroute a road. Systems have nodes (buildings) and connections (roads). Those roads have conventions that we all need to understand to stay safe. Buildings (and people) get replaced all the time. Roadways (and the rules of systems) fight like crazy to stay the way they are.

When Michelin rolled out the puncture-proof tire, they were sure they had a billion-dollar innovation. It was better for drivers, car manufacturers, and the industry. A few years later, the project was dead. Ron Adner explains that because the local tire shops, garages, and repair depots would need arduous training and new equipment, they hadn’t eagerly participated in the early days of the project, and Michelin had largely ignored them. As a result of this missing link, customers discovered that they had a great deal of trouble getting their tires serviced, and were often pushed to buy normal tires to replace their worn or damaged no-flat tires. Frustrated customers complained, and some even sued the car companies. While it’s easy to point the finger at the selfish car mechanics, the truth is that the vandal was the system—the resilient automobile industrial complex that would rather not change quickly.

A river is more than water. There’s water in a lake, too. The essence of the river is the current. Paddling upstream is more difficult than going downstream. A snapshot shows you the water, but not its motion, not the relentless force as the water moves from here to there. The river flows. If you want to change the course of a river, you can try to build a dam, but those are expensive and can fail. The alternative is to dig a small channel that helps a river to go where it was going anyway. When you make it easier for the current to flow, the current will respond. A small channel quickly becomes a torrent, and then the river itself.

We don’t try to persuade every person we meet of our status and knowledge. Instead, we paid (with time and money) to engage with an educational institution that awarded us a certificate in exchange. And even if we spend our days working as a soloist, we’re not alone. We’re part of a collective or an industry, a system to take inputs and outputs and turn them into something of value for all participants.

We need a strategy because we can’t simply order the system to follow our wishes. Part of our cultural mythos is that each of us has unlimited agency, if we’re only willing to work hard enough, demand enough, and insist enough. But systems are resilient and systems push back. The power you have lies somewhere between infinity and zero. It’s possible that you’ve accepted whatever arrives, adopting the posture of a cog or (worse) a victim. But we’re not powerless. Individuals organizing others with persistence and generosity change the world, and do it every day. With the right strategy and resources, we can make an impact. Sometimes. Buckminster Fuller taught us that to fundamentally change something, we must build a new system that makes the existing system obsolete.

We’ve lived with them so long they have become invisible, but systems are everywhere. Systems shift our perceptions and our actions, and they don’t always offer us what we want or need. So why do they stick around? Status quo—when people coordinate into networks and groups, our individual aversion to certain kinds of change is multiplied, and so the default becomes keeping things as they are. Sunk costs—once we’ve invested our effort, money, and emotions into something, it’s hard to let it go, even if it might not be what we need. Interoperability—there are practical reasons for things to work in the way they do—connectors that connect, languages that are understood, and procedures that maximize efficiency. No one wants to buy a phone that doesn’t support Bluetooth. Status roles—the hierarchy benefits those that are at the top (who have power) and they work to maintain it. They also sell everyone else on the idea that the system is the best way for them to achieve status as well. Affiliation—culture is “people like us do things like this.” Humans find solace, satisfaction, and safety in community, and our desire for affiliation maintains existing systems. It’s a lot to undo. A more resilient and leveraged path is to work with systems instead of fighting them outright.

DNA tests, passports, digital surveillance, rankings, membership lists, and SAT scores are all transformative because they surface data and turn it into information. Information changes systems.

Donella Meadows shared a story she heard from a researcher in Denmark. In 1973, they examined a suburban neighborhood of Amsterdam, where all the houses were very similar. Some of the houses had their electric meter in the basement. Others had the meter in the entrance hall, where residents couldn’t help but notice the power usage every time they entered or left their home. All other things being equal (and they were), the houses with visible meters used one-third less electricity than their neighbors.

We often spend more time figuring out how to win the game we’re in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place.

Strategy is the hard work of choosing what to do today to improve our tomorrow.

Either we make the system or the system makes us.

It might be that our actual purpose is simply to be of use, to be productive and to make a difference. In other words, to have an elegant strategy. The specifics aren’t nearly as important as the journey. Even if our project doesn’t always succeed, it is the path for us to follow. It benefits us because the liminal state of seeking to get from here to there allows us to become truly alive. Life without a project fades to gray.

Once we clarify, simplify and commit, the useful strategy creates its own challenges.

As Michael Porter has pointed out, a strategy isn’t a goal. And a strategy isn’t a list of tasks. A strategy is the set of choices we make (and stick with) as we seek to compete. Hard choices are easy to hide from, since choices feel risky. And competition is challenging. It’s easier to have a meeting about our mission statement than it is to get serious about choosing and persisting with a strategy.

Creating the conditions for success is a very different project than finding a heroic move that saves the day.

Strategy is a philosophy, based on awareness of our goals and our perception of the systems around us. Tactics are the hard work we do to support our strategy. But great tactics don’t help if the strategy is working against us.

There are three ways to put effort into a project: • Chores and tasks • Leverage • Emotional labor Chores and tasks are work we hire ourselves to do. This might be most or all of your day. Clearing your inbox, answering the phone, doing your job. Chores and tasks are all there is for workers in a factory. Sometimes they are satisfying, letting us off the hook, but they don’t take us very far. Leverage is the work we outsource. Outsourcing is far easier than it used to be, but challenges us to use our resources wisely. When we do the work that only we can do, we generate enough value to hire others to do the chores and tasks that they’re willing to do. And emotional labor is the work of change, decision-making, and strategy. It is the difficult work of embracing incompetence as we learn new skills, and the challenging work of seeing and then implementing real change. This is easy to avoid, which is one reason we spend so much time on chores and tasks.

A useful business model has a few attributes: • It gets easier over time. Past success makes future success more likely. • It’s a welcome contribution to the lives and projects of the people who are paying (in time or money) for the work. • It’s resilient. When the world changes, the model adjusts and persists or even thrives.

Our strategy is to use systems, alter systems, and build systems that expand our circles in ways each of us couldn’t do on our own.

Strategy is a flexible plan that guides us as we seek to create a change. It helps us make decisions over time while working within a system. Strategy is interesting because of the complexity of its two companions: time and systems. Time resets each day, bringing with it new chances to make new decisions. And systems involve the interconnections of multiple people (and their interests) over time. A key aspect of strategic planning is understanding opportunity costs, which are the benefits foregone by choosing one option over another. Strategy demands humility, because accurately predicting the future is impossible. Strategy also involves anticipating and planning for the actions and reactions of other actors within the system. This means considering not only the direct effects of strategic choices but also the indirect effects that come from the responses of competitors, customers, and even the environment. The success of a strategy is contingent not only on your actions but also on the actions of others. If you sell your time at the lowest possible price, you’ll always be busy helping someone else get to where they’re going. Successful people figure out how to trade their time and their effort for the change they seek to make in the world.

For each of us, our strategy lives in four dimensions. It’s not simply a drawing of what we are hoping for. It includes time and interactions as well: step and response, call and repeat, trial and improvement. Tomorrow is going to be here soon whether we plan for it or not. Showing up without a strategy is like building without a plan. It might work out, but it’s unlikely.

It’s not clear to me why business plans are the way they are, but they’re often misused to obfuscate, bore, and show an ability to comply with expectations. If I want the real truth about a business and where it’s going, I’d divide the modern business plan into six sections: 1. Truth 2. Assertions 3. Alternatives 4. People 5. Money 6. Time

The truth section describes the world as it is. Footnote it if you want to, but tell us about the market you are entering, the needs that already exist, the competitors in your space, technology standards, the way others have succeeded and failed in the past. The more specific the better. The more ground knowledge the better. The more visceral the stories the better.

The assertions section is your chance to describe how you’re going to change things. We will do X, and then Y will happen. We will build Z with this much money in this much time. We will present Q to the market and the market will respond by taking this action.

The only reason to launch a project is to change something, and I want to know what you’re going to do and what impact it’s going to have. Of course, this section will be incorrect. You will make assertions that won’t pan out. You’ll miss budgets and deadlines and sales. So the alternatives section tells me what you’ll do if that happens. How much flexibility does your product or team have? If your assertions don’t pan out, is it over?

The people section rightly highlights the key element—who is on your team and who is going to join your team. Who doesn’t mean their résumé. Instead, talk about their attitudes and abilities. Strip away the false proxies and labels and instead focus on skills, resilience and their track record in shipping.

The next section is all about money. Because projects = money + time. How much do you need, how will you spend it, what does cash flow look like, P&Ls, balance sheets, margins ...

Finally, for emphasis, time. What will be different a week or a month or a year after you launch? How will the unseen axis of time inform your planni...

Strategy is a commitment to seeing the race course before we begin.

Trying to be in two moments at once—today and the future we’re wishing for—is exhausting. An effective strategy helps us bridge the two. Strategies are the tailwind that transform a project that is barely there into one that is essential and useful.

A Framework for a Strategy • Awareness of the system and the rules. Any change we seek to make involves scarcity, the status quo, networks, and what came before. Most of all, it involves awareness of time and the distance from today until tomorrow. • Empathy for the individuals who must engage with your project. We don’t need to have sympathy or agreement to realize that other people have the independence and power to make choices, and those choices will always be based on their experience, worldview, and self-interest. • Choices are available to each of us. We have more agency than we’d like to admit, and our decisions can be better aligned with the goals of the project. • Uncertainty is a feature of every strategy. Not the delineated steps of a proven process, but the exploration and probabilities of creating a better version of the future. • Resilience comes from acknowledging that the x-axis is time, and that today is not the same as tomorrow. Few projects work as we intend, and our strategy embraces the truth that our plans will change. • Resources involve a clear understanding of what’s available to execute the strategy. This includes financial resources, human capital, technology, and other assets that can be leveraged to achieve the desired outcomes.

Culture defeats tactics every time, which is why strategy is often about creating culture.

Don’t play games you can’t win

We make a difference by seeing the system and dancing with it. We can work with a system to achieve our goals, and we can change a system over time. The first step is seeing the system, and the second step is to commit to a strategy for change. Our blueprint begins with three questions: • Who is it for? • What is it for? • What is the system?

Do the things you need to do to get what you need in the long run. • Don’t do the things that keep you from creating the change you seek.

This might be the right moment to understand our power and to do something with it.

Tactics are how we win short-term games. Tactics are flexible, disposable, and sometimes secret. Strategies are for the long-term games. Strategies are worth sharing, inspecting, and sticking with. A tactic is what we do next. A strategy is all the nexts, one after the other. Tactics are for now. Strategies see and respect and value time. If your tactics work, they should advance your strategy. If your strategy is flawed, all the successful tactics you engage in won’t help.

Strategies recognize that our time comes at a cost, and challenge us to choose.