building a digital strategy

What digital strategy is and what makes it a good one is as different between the accompanying doodles and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. There are, apparently, geniuses that will be able to pull concepts that deliver at the drop of the hat without resorting to strategy. Whether by luck, or just snake oil, these are rare and inconsistent. For the rest of us, the hard yards of process, planning and examining workings are our routes to success.

A good strategy has at a minimum, the same qualities as a good story:

• a beginning: the scene is set
• a destination: there is an aim
• a journey: the steps to get there
• a device: the tools to get the job done
• the cast: those people that will help the strategy along its way

Regardless of what the digital strategy is set to achieve, without touching on each of these areas it is impossible to devise and execute an optimal strategy. There is no one single approach to the delivery of a digital strategy, yet each must touch upon these areas to a greater or lesser extent to achieve success.

an approach – think play solve

Think play solve reflects the three stages to a successful strategy, miss one in this approach and the strategy, projects and project stages within will suffer.

Each of these stages runs into the next, not just once but as an iterative cycle for continual improvement. Tasks at each stage breakdown to:

In each of the stages the parts of the story can be found:

• think: where do we start and where do we hope to end
• play: what tools do we have and who can help us get there
• solve: the journey we take to get there and how we conclude

The approach taken to building a digital strategy must reflect the definition of digital strategy:

• digital strategy must be measurable, therefore the approach should incorporate measurement
• digital strategy must evolve, therefore the approach must be amendable
• digital must grow, therefore the approach should be extendable

lifecycle

An often-repeated mistake is to set the lifecycle of a strategy by arbitrary dates in a calendar. Whilst it is certainly true that stages, and indeed projects, will have deadlines there is rarely a 'one size fits all' answer to the length and lifecycle of a strategy. Remember: Rome was not built in a day!

The evolution from nascent challenge to the ambition is delivered through cycles, be they establishing a foothold, achieving or a short-term boost to the bottom line, or to the longer-term mature platform to establish your ambition.

back to the story

Stories are important, Philip Pullman once said:

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

From the hushed voices floating in flickering firelight across pre-historic caves to the latest blockbuster stories are how humanity understands the world, and stories are how humanity shapes the world. In that case why should digital strategy be any different? In short it is not different, digital strategy must embrace stories; they are far more than a useful analogy.

To fully envisage a digital strategy requires a level of understanding that if not complete, certainly encompasses detail beyond the big picture. The numbers view will always be in the subjective, the KPIs and the reporting, and the subjective is not to be discounted. To hold any digital strategy purely in the subjective balance sheet of targets and results is misusing the ability to consider the objective. The role of stories is best defined in narrative transportation theory (Green and Brock, 2002; Van Laer, de Ruyter, Visconti, and Wetzels, 2014) where the mind places itself in the story and in such:

• Process the story
• Engage mentally and empathetically
• Create a world within a world

The transportation into the ‘story’ achieves absorption, involvement, identification and flow (leading to optimal experience), and immersion. In a complex system of many moving parts this enables the results first subjective to be balanced by the empathetic objective to ask

“Does this feel right?”

Furthermore with the specific ambition of a digital strategy in mind:

“How does this drive the story? Is this plausible?”

It is then the nuts and bolts of analysis, the thinking, to provide the foundation of the narrative and ensure that science removes any bias.

together

Building a good digital strategy relies on both the approach and the story. The approach is the process by which a proof can be derived, workings can be assessed and measured, and the foundations set to ensure correct rigor. The story is the empathetic understanding of what and why, the doorway into the crux of the ambition, and the constant reflected narrative that charts a course between function and fantasy. They are the left and right hemispheres of our brains working in tandem.

a word on ambition

As stories are important so are words. When approaching the everyday, as many projects are, ambition can seem grandiose at the beginning. Projects are not strategy, but merely steppingstones along the way, as goals and aims are not ambition. It is in the bigger picture where strategy lives, building on simple ongoing goals, timely achieved aims to an overarching ambition.

These terms define the granularity required to rapidly move from big picture thinking or focus on the most minute of details. It is not just the first step in a digital strategy that requires the setting and alignment of aims and goals, but each iteration, and each must come back to how they meet the ambition.

These are, however, for next time.