Strategic factors, strategy and initiatives

The response side: what the business has decided to do about the demand, what forces it must answer to, and the bets that carry it out.

Strategic factors — the forces you did not choose

A strategic factor is one fact about your business environment: a regulation, a technology shift, a competitor's move, a capability you hold, a weakness you carry.

Each is classified so the standard analytical views fall out of the same nodes rather than being maintained as separate documents:

kind — which frame it belongs to (a PESTEL letter, a Porter force, an internal trait, a market event);
orientation — INTERNAL or EXTERNAL: where it comes from;
disposition — whether it works for you or against you.

Orientation and disposition together give you SWOT for free:

	works for you	works against you
`INTERNAL`	Strength	Weakness
`EXTERNAL`	Opportunity	Threat

That matters more than it looks. SWOT, PESTEL and Porter are usually three workshops producing three decks that quietly disagree. Here they are three queries over one set of facts, so a factor cannot be a strength in one deck and unmentioned in another.

Record factors you cannot act on. A regulation you must comply with is not actionable and is absolutely a factor — it constrains every strategy that follows, and a model that only held things you can change would be a wish list.

Strategy — the how

A strategy is a choice about how to pursue the mission. It links upward to the mission it pursues and downward to the initiatives that execute it, and it may root in a belief.

Strategies cascade: a strategy can be the parent of others, so a company-level choice refines into divisional ones without anybody re-typing the parent's intent.

Like the mission, a strategy's content is replaced wholesale on each revision and every revision is kept, so the history of what you decided — and when you changed your mind — survives.

A strategy that excludes nothing is not a strategy. If yours would be agreed to by every competitor, it is a description of the industry. Strategy is choice, and choice is visible in what you have decided not to do.

Beneath strategies sits a layer you shape yourself. A sub-strategy definition is a kind of strategy your company defines — a technology strategy, a go-to-market strategy, a people-and-culture strategy — with its own content shape. Records are the filled-in instances.

Two things follow:

The kind is yours. Where the core strategy has a fixed shape, a sub-strategy kind is a template you set once and every team fills in consistently.
Publishing freezes it. A definition is editable while it is a draft; once published, the shape is locked and changing it means publishing a new version. That is what keeps records authored last quarter valid against the template they were written for.

You do not create a sub-strategy link out of nothing — you attach a record to the strategy it refines. A refinement with no parent is a strategy, and should be one.

Initiative — the concrete bet

An initiative executes a strategy. It is the layer where intent becomes something with a shape, an owner and a cost — and it is born attached to the strategy it executes, so an orphan initiative is not expressible.

That constraint is the point. An initiative that executes no strategy is work somebody started for a reason nobody wrote down, and those are the ones that survive three planning cycles because nobody can say what killing them would cost.

Initiatives are bets, so give them the honesty of bets. A bet has a thesis you could be wrong about. If you cannot say what would tell you this one is not working, you have a project rather than an initiative — and projects do not get cancelled, which is the problem.

The chain, and what it buys

flowchart LR
  B["Belief"] --> ST["Strategy"]
  SF["Strategic factor"] --> ST
  M["Mission"] --> ST
  ST --> ST2["Sub-strategy"]
  ST --> I["Initiative"]
  MET["Metric"] -.measures.-> I
  MET -.measures.-> ST

Every link is walkable in both directions, which makes two otherwise-expensive questions cheap:

downward — what are we actually doing about this? From a mission to its strategies to their initiatives.
upward — why are we doing this? From an initiative to the strategy it executes to the belief that strategy rests on. When the belief is ASSUMED, you have just learned something important about the bet.

Working practices

Keep the mission singular and the strategies few. Fifteen active strategies is a portfolio of hopes.
Root strategies in beliefs, deliberately. A strategy rooted in nothing is either obvious or arbitrary, and the graph will not tell you which.
Check the keystone. Is there a belief that one of your strategies and one of your customers' goals both root in? That coincidence is what alignment looks like as a fact rather than an assertion. See Mission and beliefs.
Archive rather than quietly abandon. A strategy left ACTIVE while everyone has stopped working on it makes every roll-up wrong, and the initiatives beneath it keep looking justified.