Ep 33 - From Laundrylist, Wishlist or Checklist to a Game-Changing Strategy
Picture two teams in your company, six months apart. The first team is drowning. They have 47 "strategic initiatives" on their list, no clear way to prioritize, and every meeting devolves into debates about resources. Morale is terrible, and nobody can articulate what they're really trying to accomplish. Fast forward six months: the same team, but now they're energized, focused, and can explain their strategy in three minutes. Projects that don't serve their core hypothesis get killed quickly. They're making contingency plans because they understand their strategy is a bet, not a certainty. 03:55 - Searching "strategic hypothesis" online makes executives more confused, not clearer—vocabulary alone won't save a strategy-less plan from board scrutiny. 08:05 - Teams mistake bureaucratic obligation for strategy, creating wish lists that satisfy checklists but fail Janet's "where's your overarching hypothesis?" test. 17:30 - When boards reject plans with 55 sensible initiatives, they're not critiquing ideas—they're exposing the absence of strategic cause-and-effect thinking. 52:09 - Strategy's brutal reality: everything's changing, data's flaky, and you get one shot at your hypothesis—not multiple lab experiments with do-overs. 57:21 - Six AI prompts reveal whether your plan contains testable strategic hypotheses or merely business-as-usual activities masquerading as surgical interventions. What happened in between? They stopped confusing a strategic plan with actual strategy. Today, I want to walk you through that transformation, because the gap between these two states isn't about working harder—it's about thinking differently. Tune into this episode to join me in tackling this wicked problem.
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