Have you fact-checked your strategy?

Grounding your strategy in reality keeps wishful thinking at bay.

THINK ON IT: Have you fact-checked your strategy?

Consider this: your strategy is arguably your most important thought product.

Yet, we are wired to take short-cuts in our thinking—to make assumptions, jump to conclusions, and to be drawn more to appearance over substance.

Neuroscientist Gregory Berns wasted no words about this tendency: the brain is a “lazy piece of meat.”

Shouldn’t we be fact-checking the byproduct of our most important work—our business strategy? 

In fact, the ability to lead from reality, in my view, is the Number 2 job of a leader, right behind the ability to create a clearly defined future. These two polarities—where you want to go, and where you are today—create the strategic tension that propels your organization to take action.

That means your strategy needs to be grounded in reality—not just wishful thinking.

And our job as leaders is to safeguard our strategy from the incursion of lazy-piece-of-meat thinking that results in untested assumptions and unrealistic expectations.

In fact, there are over 180 such lazy brain shortcuts, called cognitive biases. So, it’s incumbent on us to be extra vigilant that those biases haven’t overly infected our strategies.

We have to think like fact-checkers—exercising that extra discipline to confirm our beliefs and assumptions.

Of course, there’s many things you can’t have 100% certainty in. But you can put on the mindset of having a no-BS filter that only lets credible information inform your decisions. And you can test your strategy with your blind spot detection force to help you see what you may be missing. 

So, kick your lazy piece of meat into action this week and ask, What assumptions are we making with our business strategy that should be fact-checked?

Premium Subscribers, read on to learn how an approach used by professional fact-checkers can improve your BS filter and for a 4-D framework to ensure your most important decisions are grounded in reality. (Become a Premium Subscriber. Paid subscribers get access to nearly 100 tools and how-tos on implementing strategic topics, including a 7-part series to help leaders build their personal strategic capacity.)

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“The highest art of professional management requires the literal ability to ‘smell’ a ‘real fact’ from all other–and moreover to have the temerity, intellectual curiosity, guts and/or plain impoliteness, if necessary, to be sure that what you have is indeed what we call an ‘unshakable fact.”

— Harold Geneen

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