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Ruthlessly Strategic

Each of us wants to make a difference. But if we want to create real, lasting change, then experience tells us that simply running faster or harder won't do the trick. We have to become much more ruthlessly strategic.

For us, this is fundamentally about one's orientation to their work and the communities they serve. Being ruthlessly strategic is about knowing the actual conditions we face in our community and understanding what it takes for communities to change. It also is about how we identify the right levers for change given those conditions, and when to put them into play at the right time.

We all have limited resources; that will never change. Our concern is how we determine the best set of actions that will generate the conditions that will increase the likelihood for real progress. Too often, we're "activity happy and action deprived" in our work. That needs to change.

If we want to create authentic hope, then we will need to become more "ruthlessly strategic."

But this isn't easy. There's so much happening around us - pressure to take best practices off the shelf and "plug and play" them; strategic planning processes that seem at times to only move boxes around, and so on. In fact, we can become so mechanistic that we can get lost in going through the motions; we end up talking more about our plans and initiatives than we do about the very essence of the work at hand. This is never our intention, just the unintended consequences.

There are a variety of steps to becoming ruthlessly strategic, but for now, here are five questions we often ask people to get started. We call them the "Anti-Clutter Check" because there is so much we need to sweep away so we can focus on what's really at work, what we seek to achieve, and how we can create the right pathways for people to move forward. Use these questions in doing your work.

Anti-Clutter Check

1.   Is there clarity of purpose?
2.   Do you have the capacity to catch the initiative you're undertaking?
3.   Are you activity happy, yet action deprived?
4.   Will your work really move the needle?
5.   Is this really manageable?