An odd thing happened a while ago. I was reviewing a strategy document for a team and the discussion was infuriating me. (In case you’re wondering, no one could tell - I checked later - at that point in my life no one seemed to be able to tell when I was angry :-)). The team was spending way too much time discussing the “Principles” for how to make strategic decisions before addressing the strategic issue at hand.
I was pretty sure it wasn’t helping and was a distraction, but I couldn’t get the group to move on, cos how do you argue with “Let’s write down our principles first!”, especially because for years that’s what I did!!
Here’s why articulating your principles before making a strategic decision is useful. It can serve as a really valuable guide especially for teams that need a lot of context fast. For years for example, when it came to decisions related to ecosystem products I used some version of “We take into account the impact of our decisions on Partners, Users and Advertisers but when in doubt and on balance we put the User first.” It’s obvious once you write it down, but it helped people make decisions.
When you notice patterns of things that apply broadly, e.g. for a time “No free pixels” was hugely useful to many teams at YouTube as a way settle arguments about if we could use space in certain ways, or “Even playing fields” was a way to remind teams to make their features available to everyone and not favor certain creators over others. On a smaller team, I reminded people constantly I was expecting them to launch features everywhere which was helpful in preventing people coming up with US-only launch plans (which used to happen a lot before).
These make sense to communicate broadly and should be in a document somewhere for people to refer to, i.e. if you haven’t written your principles down already, ideally a long time ago with significant thought it’s silly to try to write them down instead of focussing on a decision.
In fact, good principles come out of pattern matching across bunch of different decisions over time and ideally are generalizable to other teams or constant for years.
In the absence of that time, effort and experience, teams or people try to come up with platitudes they’ve heard before and then try to apply them in a simplistic way to a the issue at hand cos “it matches our principles” and don’t think deeply about the implications of that single decision. It’s easy to sound smart with “motherhood and apple pie” principles.
Which is why most teams I’ve seen try to “write down our team principles” before making a strategic decisions both write bad, general principles and then go on to make a sub-optimal decisions based on it.
So if you haven’t written your Principles already, don’t start it when you need to make a tactical/strategic decision. Just focus on that.
Does that resonate with folks?