Many books suggest what you should do to solve various problems. They focus on what to do and how to do it. My experience is that such advice is often limited in its usefulness.
How you think and what you believe matters most
It is not just doing things that matters; it is how you think about what you do and what you believe about what you do.
These often have a far greater influence on success. In Communicating Strategy, my aim was to give you tools to make decisions for yourself.
The book does not try to say ‘If you do all these things, you will successfully communicate your strategy’. What it sets out to give you is the underlying thinking, tools and techniques that you can choose from. It provides advice on when to use those tools and how best to use them, but ultimately how you think about the approach will determine what you use when.
It is said that bad workers blame their tools. Likewise, an unthinking manager uses tools just because they are there. That is the route to fad management. Please do not go down this route.
Developing your thinking and judgement around communicating strategy
The book aims to help you develop the thinking behind good communication of strategy. It aims to help you develop your judgement as to how best to communicate in a particular situation.
How you communicate your strategy will depend upon your personality, your thinking styles and your motivations. One purpose of this book, particularly in chapters two and three, is to help you to realize the impact of your way of thinking and your preferences. This does not just apply to individuals. Organizations, too, have personalities, thinking styles and motivations. These personal and organizational preferences will also influence how you will tend to prefer to communicate your strategy.
This clash of preferences between individuals or between individuals and the organizational character often lies at the root of poor communication. Understanding it will help you address it, before you make mistakes.
