This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

created an endless feedback loop. Tim Wu made it crystal clear that once we have enough to survive, we go looking for convenience. People will trade almost anything once they’re offered an option that enhances laziness or seems to multiply free time. And this helps us see that what most people in most systems want is reassurance. Freedom from fear.

Understanding the 2 x 2 Positioning Grid

Systems are everywhere humans engage to fill a need. Sometimes they persist longer than we’d like. Sometimes they move in directions we don’t appreciate. Often, they’re cultural, invisible, and hard to notice. But systems define our lives.

might do a fine job at the beginning. The climb to the peak of Mt. Everest is legendarily difficult, but it begins with a nine-day walk from the city of Lukla to the Base Camp.

Getting stung by a wasp is an unfortunate situation. It hurts. It can’t be undone. Other than a bit of first aid, there are no decisions to be made. Avoiding getting stung by a wasp tomorrow is a problem. We have choices to make, investments of time or effort to consider, and a chance to reconsider the objectives that may have caused the first situ

Once this group finds affiliation and status from engaging with our work, we create the conditions for them to share the story with others—but they won’t tell the story that attracted them in the first place. They’ll tell a different story, also true, and one that will attract their friends.

Celebrate the problems ahead. Problems are opportunities to create the conditions for better outcomes.

Instead, each person in the system imagines what actions are likely to lead to the most useful responses. Useful for them. Useful today.

We make two errors, again and again: • When pitching an idea, we imagine that the person we’re talking to cares primarily about the entire system, about what it should want. They don’t. They’re not even aware of the entire system. They’re simply thinking about their boss, or their urgent needs, or nothing much at all.

First, we need to see the problem. We need to understand the systems, the constraints, and the desires of those we serve. We can become smarter about what assets we control and how we can invest in them and make them work better for us. Don’t focus on a situation, which is not a problem at all. A situation is a mismatch of constraints and goals. A