💨 Is your strategy looking a bit... wafty?

Former political adviser Emma Silver argued in this series that lots of people “have a wafty idea of what they want to do.” She continued: “It’s okay if that’s your mission and vision, but what are the individual [objectives] that get you there and what’s the journey?”

I love that ‘wafty idea’ quote because it is so true. Strategy documents often list off a bunch of hopes and dreams (“we must be more collaborative,” “we must improve the evidence base,” “we must increase our influence and impact”) rather than actual objectives.

The result is that teams don’t really understand what you want from them or what the priority is. Inevitably that leads to a senior management team frustrated that they aren’t getting what they want. And a delivery team that is frustrated that management can’t articulate what they want. The underlying problem is one of approach.

In this piece, we’ll go through the signs that your strategy is wafty, what a good objective looks like, and what happens when you have good objectives.

The two telltale signs of a wafty strategy

Hopefully your organisational strategy sets out where you want to be as an organisation in 3-5 years, and a series of SMART objectives that management believe will get you there. The signs that this document needs more work are typically that it is either full of vision statements, or it objectifies tactics. Let me explain both.

Vision statements as objectives

These are statements like ‘we must change the narrative on X’ or ‘we need to be more influential’. These are more like goals (desired outcomes) rather than objectives (the milestones that lead to you those outcomes).

These statements are too abstract; objectives should be specific. Take the target outcome of ‘we need to be more influential.’ Influential among who? In what time frame? Measured how? Give a team that clarity, and they’ll have a much better chance of cultivating the kind of influence you want to have.

My biggest challenge with vision statements being used as objectives is that this approach rarely unpacks the scale of work that is needed. Changing a narrative, for example, is typically a huge, multi-year piece of work. If you have a handful of such chunky outcomes to aim for, most teams are going to be utterly slammed trying to achieve them.

When you break each vision statement out into clear objectives, it becomes a lot clearer what the work is, what kind of team you need to deliver it, and how much of their capacity it will take up. It has started to become practically useful—and you’re much more likely to achieve things as a result.

Tactics as objectives

If vision statements are too big, objectified tactics are too small. Examples of these include things like ‘produce six reports this year’ or ‘get a meeting with three key politicians’. Whatever you are getting that meeting for is likely your objective, not the meeting itself (and if you don’t have a reason, that is your problem.)

Many Policy Unstuck guests have railed against this approach. Dom Hallas attributed these kinds of objectives as the reason why “so much work in public affairs is crap,” and Tom Madders made a persuasive argument (that changed how we do our internal KPIs) that qualified KPIs are often more useful than quantified KPIs in this work.

The challenge with objectifying tactics is that you create perverse incentives.

Colleagues do the thing that you’ve incentivised them to do—even if they know it’s not the best thing to do. For example, they may prioritise getting as many newsletter subscribers as possible—even if those subscribers are completely the wrong audience who contribute nothing to your influence. Or colleagues may get a meeting with a politician even though they don’t have something substantive to say, simply because they need to get meetings for their annual review.

It’s easy to dismiss this as ‘this would never happen at my organisation,’ but time and time again, politicians and political advisers say in their Policy Unstuck interviews that they regularly have meaningless meetings. Clearly many of us are doing this. It’s not only an inefficient way of working, but it damages your organisation’s reputation:

What does a good objective look like?

I have hopefully established the ineffectiveness of vision statements as objectives, and the futility of tactics as objectives, but what does good look like when it comes to objectives?

There are lots of frameworks you can use. We often use the SMART framework (objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.) It is well-known yet often poorly implemented. The main culprit is simple: good objectives are binary.

When it comes to an objective, you should either be able to achieve it or fail. Purgatory does not exist in objective land, it’s heaven or hell. If your strategy document says ‘increase our brand salience among policymakers,’ it has not met this criteria. That statement can be argued in different ways. It is not binary. To fix it, you’d need to answer questions like:

• What does brand salience mean?

• Which policymakers do you mean?

• How are you going to measure it?

• Over what time period?

This questioning is an important part of the process, because it is getting you, the author of the strategy, to be specific about what you actually mean. It is really easy to write vision statements, much harder to rationalise an objective. But by doing that work, it means everyone else understands what you want from them. The above example could end up something like: Increase the number of MPs referring to our research in parliament (via Hansard) from AA to BB, over the next MM months.

We can (and should) argue about whether that is the correct approach to increasing brand salience among policymakers, but for a team receiving that objective, there is nowhere to hide. They either achieve it or they don’t. A binary objective creates accountability because the team responsible has a clear target, and their leadership has a straightforward way of evaluating. Everyone knows what the deal is.

The benefits of good objectives

For the person orchestrating the strategy, the value of objective-setting is the thought process behind it. By the end of it, you will have a very clear sense of what you want from your team(s). That clarity of thought is priceless.

For the team receiving the objectives, they finally understand what you want. They understand your expectations, know how they are going to be evaluated in their annual reviews, and they understand the role they play in the organisation.

As for the organisation, it is more likely:

1. To achieve its long-term goals — because everyone knows the milestones that are on the way, and who is responsible for attaining them.

2. To be seen as the ‘voice of the sector’ — because it will start using communications as a strategic discipline rather than a tactical one

3. To become more efficient and productive — because clear objectives give you a clear sense of the roles and skills you need on your team (and in your consultants!)

If you’ve enjoyed this post, you may find our course on strategic policy communications useful. It takes this argument further, through audience segmentation, framing, persuasion models, and why messengers matter more than people think. And of course, please give me a shout if you need a thought partner to guide and inform your strategy development.

Tom

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