Dfs Captain Strategy
Jovanna Ponder
Opportunistic thinking means starting from whatever resources you have, the context, what is at hand. From that point on, we need to generate actions that will allow us to capture those opportunities at the right time. It means using our sails to take advantage of the wind, every single gust, to efficiently sail towards any given port. Now, this kind of thinking may work well operationally. Though it is of no use if you want to generate a strategic plan.
To think strategically we need much more than setting a profitability or volume target. Yes, profitability is essential to a company as a requirement. Growing, selling, making the most money you can is clearly a common point we all share. However, it is not enough when defining your strategy. You can make the ship sail faster, but you need to know where it is headed.
We often set a volume goal and ask our teams to propose actions in order to plan ahead. Sometimes we ask the team to do extensive market research work to detect opportunities (insights) that will help define actions. It is a clearly opportunistic starting point. Strategy is not something you ask, nor does it result from research, or a number of insights. Like goals, it is a top-down process, originating in what you want in the end. It starts from the decision of what kind of company we want to be and how we want to differentiate ourselves along the way.
Once the strategy is defined and shared with others, we can ask those teams working close to operations and reality to propose initiatives leading to action. Once teams are in line with a clear, common strategy, we can give way to a spiraling creative process of initiatives and projects that will lead us to our destination. A sailor might suggest we change the sail, and another member of the crew might recommend we adjust our direction, but this is only possible if the journey is clearly defined and everyone knows about it.
Some might say it will depend on how fond you are of watermelons and how badly you want to win the race. However, stopping to pick up the watermelon sounds like a strange choice. For watermelons are easier to get than marathons, so it might be better not to give in to that temptation, reach the finish line, and think about how to get a watermelon later on. What if it were not a watermelon, but a bar of solid gold? Or two bars? What about three?
Profitability may distract us from our strategy. Short-term goals may tempt us to compromise long-term goals if we want them badly. Temporary price discounts might give us the volume growth we need to attain the volume goal in our plan. However, what about our pricing position? Does this affect the brand? Profitability, volume or share goals are short-term and will not show us how to get to the destination we want.
With the exception of these two instances (there may be just a few more), the strategic plan is what needs to set the direction, and that means decisions cannot be biased depending on what we have or know, but motivate us to ask the necessary questions to reach our destination.
Based on opportunities only, the plan will never guarantee the long-term future, nor define short-term results as our full potential. Profitability understood as the only single goal is hollow and cannot guide us to grow. It creates stress and does not help us succeed. A plan based on strategies will help us face known challenges and guide our teams towards a common goal. A plan based on strategies will help us choose the port and bring us closer to it.
Most ultimate players are probably familiar with this phenomenon. I experienced it myself in college, witnessed it in club, and certainly see it now coaching a college team. Earlier this year, a young, passionate captain of the team came to the rest of the leadership to share these very frustrations, wanting to personally be able to have more to offer the team strategically when problems arise. I offered my perspective, which I hoped might help relieve some of her frustration and allow her to see a path toward becoming the leader she wants to be.
What follows is the advice I sent her1, edited for context, personal references, vulgarity, and general readability, in the hope that it can be useful to other young and passionate captains out there.
When you step on the field with a team, most of what determines the outcome comes down to how well practice has prepared your team and the raw individual talent balance. A leader can still have a impact on the trajectory of the game, but start by recognizing that there is only so much you can do to fix problems in the moment. Rely on what you have prepared for in practice, then just use common sense.
There are several facets to in-game decision making, but if we focus on making adjustments in real time, there are particular aspects, which in combination inform what kind of decisions are made and can provide tangible paths to increase your capacity as a leader: Knowledge, Experience, Confidence, and Common Sense. Knowledge and experience are your primary sources for answers to tactical questions, but they are filtered sometimes significantly through what you bring to the table in confidence and common sense.
As a final word of caution: reading lots of pages and watching lots of videos can only get you so far. I might even warn that filling your brain up with too many conflicting ideas about how ultimate should work, when to run set plays, and what systems to implement, might get in the way of figuring out what will actually work for you and when. All of the resources listed above can inform the knowledge you have to draw from, however, the most valuable type of knowledge is that which comes from experience of what actually works for you and your team.
If solutions to problems are mainly informed by the knowledge and experience you have, the recognition and implementation of those solutions is shaped by the personal and psychological lens you bring to the whole process. Particularly what you add to the equation with confidence and common sense.
Most of the tactical decisions made during a typical game of college ultimate fall more under common sense than something you might have to read in a high-level article with diagrams and analyses. Common sense is a little bit of a loaded term, but for the purposes of making in-game adjustments, I mean just evaluating the most basic facts about a problematic situation and utilizing the resources you have available to come up with a solution.
This is all from the perspective of an inexperienced captain trying to get better at these things personally. This is not necessarily a process I think applies to every leadership situation, and is not necessarily the main approach of an experienced coach. But no matter your situation, approaching the process with a common sense mindset can help you stay grounded and maintain the flow of knowledge through experience, streamlining the process of you growing into your leadership capability and style.
It follows that asking your organization to change course is a tremendous ask of its people, processes, systems, and culture. To do so takes great resources and a leader who can inspire transformation across the entire business.
Much has been written about the complexity of Strategy Execution Management, but like being faced with treacherous sailing conditions, your organization requires effective leadership to guide you through the transformation that awaits you.
Captains make full use of their surroundings, experience, and crewmates to navigate from point A to point B. How they reach this destination is no small feat. Neither is a strategic leader achieving their breakthrough goals over a three-five year period.
When planning and formulating a strategic direction, leaders will go into the process open-minded, knowing that their decisions will lead them to have to motivate and move their organization to work together towards a new, breakthrough level of performance.
The leader will be tasked with translating the vision, mission, and strategic objectives into breakthrough goals and improvement priorities. Therefore, enthusiasm and interest in wanting to learn new skills and achieve unparalleled success are needed.
This is typically referred to as portfolio management. The leader will need to have systems in place to tell them about the utilization of resources, ROI of current projects, and completion rates, for starters.
The leader is, indeed, the captain of the strategic ship. They are the thread that holds together the different initiatives and they have the presence and fortitude to clarify, inspire and re-direct the organization back towards its intended destination.
This open-mindedness reaches into the realms of new processes, systems, and software to underpin their Strategy Execution Management. Whatever leverage can be made of new possibilities, they are open to this.
They use this to show their passion for the plan, setting clear boundaries of the game and a playing field for change by mobilizing internal resources and external advice to set the best course of action.
With ample data at their disposal in the form of digital dashboards, trusted and empowered stakeholders from across the Enterprise Project Management Office, and leaders from within the three layers of their strategic plan, they put logic and data above narrative when making decisions.
Akin to the captain making use of their radar, sense of direction, and chief engineer, the strategic decision-maker makes the decisions they feel are best, with all available data, on which initiatives to push forward with, which to reallocate resources to, and the others which should be side-lined.
If your organization knows of your vision and all that has colored your direction, objectives can be formed and aligned easier, and front-line staff knows that their work is absolutely contributing to the greater good.
Without these in place, your strategy will fall into that 70% failure rate with great ease. Why? Because a strategy is simply a piece of paper. Implementation sees your strategy flow into the planning phase, ready for successful execution.
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