Written by Jeremy Langley – Marketing Director at The Marketing Centre

Much as I’d love to tell you that I have a handicap of 4, or that I played sport to semi-professional level, or that I give a stuff who are likely to win the Premier league but the truth is that I’ve never been particularly interested in sports. I’m pretty competitive, and I was fast, so I was never quite last to be picked in the school line-up, but never first. I ran nationally for the 2000 metre steeplechase and came 2nd – but as the entire field was humiliatingly lapped in the third lap by the eventual winner, I’m not sure I can draw on the glories of that one either…

So when trying to draw on analogies for driving success in business it’s never been a particularly rich seam for me, my stories never start “You know when you’re 3 down in the 4th” (if that’s even a thing). However there was one sporting lesson however that has stayed in mind since I first heard it, and I think it’s a powerful one for Marketers and CEO’s in particular.

I came to swimming late, and started swimming competitively in my late 30s with my local Master’s club. I was OK, and what I lacked in experience I made up for in enthusiasm. But it was clear that I needed some technique training and so I signed up to a course called Slippery Fish.

The principle of the training is that you can never compensate in energy for what you lack in technique. And the goal of the technique was simply to make the smallest possible hole in the water and swim through it.

To bring this idea to life imagine two shapes pushing through water, one a cube and the other a polyhedron (pyramid).

Now imagine pushing those shapes through the water from behind. If you used an equal amount of energy to push each shape through the water then the ‘ROI’ of the energy you used to push the pyramid forward will significantly exceed that of the energy used to push the cube. In other words, the pyramid will move forward a lot further and a lot faster than the cube, which creates more drag force, even though you used exactly the same force. It’s simple hydrodynamics.

Now let’s bring that back to business. When looking at corporate strategy it’s reasonable to assume that the energy (people, resources, money) that is available to achieve success is always finite and usually fixed. Therefore it seems to me that a key function of a strategy is to use that fixed energy to move forward as fast as possible, and so the task of strategy development is to identify and define that “small hole in the water” and to help the organisation to swim through it – it’s the organisation as a slippery fish.

And that’s where strategy gets scary. Because good strategy should be ‘pointy’ and streamlined, but for many organisations there’s a comfort in swimming wide and slow – not defining a target market, a target customer, or a vertical. Or developing a safe and woolly ‘catch-all’ value proposition, allowing the latest customer to dictate the product road-map, or putting your business ‘out there’ to see who bites and then allowing the market, or the last sales win, to drive ‘strategy’ development.

Good strategy defines what’s in and what’s out. Good strategy work means identifying what we won’t do, as much as what we will do. It can mean identifying which big beasts will no longer be chased, what sales efforts are a waste of time and where we can never keep customers happy. It can often mean sacrificing a sacred cow that has been worshiped for many years (or recategorising the old cash cow as a dog). And around any boardroom table (and if strategic planning is only a board-level activity then see me after school) there will be people who are vested in the cash cow.

Because many people would often rather have the comfort of the ‘failing familiar’ than face a new strategy where they may be uncertain of their own capability to succeed. That’s true at all levels of an organisation – and the willingness of a CEO to let go of what used to work, and to be prepared to get comfortable with a degree of ‘conscious incompetence’ can be a key factor in strategic success.

So if you come out of a strategic planning session and there isn’t a degree of fear around the table (nervous excited energy is the output I would prefer) then I would challenge whether you should be spending longer in the room making the hole smaller – or ask who you’re trying to keep happy…