- What is your current situation? What undesirable situation are you in?
- What position do you want to be in? This is what I call a position-aspiration.
- What do you need to be able to do to enter and maintain this position indefinitely? Yes, indefinitely. Imagine that you had to enter and maintain this position with no foreseeable end. What would need to be the case in order for this position to be sustainable?
- Which capabilities will be challenging to acquire or develop, and why? What obstacles may you come across? What resistance may you have to overcome? What is going to keep you from being able to enter this position and maintain it indefinitely?
- What methods can you use to overcome or manage these challenges? (Use the four methods I discussed in the last post.)
To illustrate how these questions work, let’s take an example.
Let’s say you are want to start eating a dramatically healthier diet. Let’s go through the five questions:
- What’s your current situation? I am eating very unhealthy. Most of my diet is made up unhealthy foods. This is causing low energy and poor health.
- What position do you want to be? I want to be in a position where 90% of the foods I eat in a given week is healthy.
- What capabilities do you need to be able to do to enter and maintain this position indefinitely? I need to be able to
- Tell what are healthy foods and what are unhealthy foods
- Afford the healthy foods
- Track what I eat daily
- Withstand the urge to eat unhealthy foods more than the prescribed amount (10%)
- Which capabilities will be challenging to acquire or develop, and why? Here are a few challenges:
- Telling what are healthy foods and what are unhealthy foods, because I lack the in-depth knowledge
- Withstanding the urge to eat unhealthy foods more than prescribed amount
- What methods can you use to overcome or manage these challenges?
- Overcoming the knowledge problem requires a simple tactic to overcome: research an article or book on what’s healthy and what’s not, make a list of the healthy foods I like or could eat on a regular basis, and buy those.
- Withstanding the urge to eat unhealthy foods will require a number of tactics (such as drinking more water, eat more protein, change your environment, etc.), habits/practices (e.g. mindful eating), and rules (“No eating after 7 pm”).
I am, of course, oversimplifying, but you can see from the example how these five strategic questions help to formulate a strong strategic plan – one that incorporates the resistance and challenge you will face in trying to introduce change.