#39 🧭💡 Goal, Strategy, Plan and Objectives - how do they connect?
And how you can use them for your professional growth
I see many people struggling to make the distinctions and connections between words like goals, strategies, plans and objectives. Sometimes using goals and objectives interchangeably, most of the times confusing strategies with plans.
Here is an example from the daily life, one that you can use to easily explain these concepts to the people around you:
Let’s suppose you are hungry (current state).
You want to eat something (goal).
From the many ways to accomplish this goal, you decide on cooking something (strategy).
Assuming it’s a dish that you don’t master yet, you plan to follow a recipe (plan).
When cooking, you might want to pay attention to whether the taste of what you’re cooking is good and that you finish cooking relatively fast, e.g. cook in max. 1 hour (objectives).
In other words, the strategy is the approach you take to progress to a better situation in a context (from current state to goal), while the plan is the set of steps you take while following this specific approach. You set the specific objectives to help you decide if you’re successful in taking this specific approach.
From the starting point described above (being hungry):
you might have a different goal (e.g. fast that day);
you might have a different strategy/approach (e.g. order some food);
you might have a different plan/set of steps even if you decide to cook (e.g. prepare something you know, instead of following the steps in a recipe);
you might have different objectives even if you decide to cook by following the steps in the recipe (e.g. minimize wasted ingredients, minimize the mess in the kitchen).
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Having certain capabilities allow you to pursue specific strategies or not. For example, even if you decide to cook, but you lack the capability, meaning:
lack the skills or
lack the tools (e.g. ingredients, kitchen tools) or
lack the proper setup (e.g. available kitchen, available time to cook);
… You might decide to approach the situation in another way.
Now, making the leap towards professional goals, strategies, plans and objectives, one example might be:
You are working now in a demanding role, 50-60h/week including the commute time, that leaves you with less time and energy for your family (current state);
You want to have more flexibility during the week and much more time with your family (goal);
You are exploring multiple strategies/approaches to achieve this:
Negotiating a part-time agreement in your current role;
Searching for a less demanding role in the same company / field / industry;
Searching for a less demanding role in another company / field / industry;
Validating whether you could run your own service/product business;
Validating whether you could be a contractor for a service business that offers training and/or consulting in your areas of expertise;
Validating whether you could find a publisher to launch the book where you share your stories, knowledge and expertise.
For validating whether you could run your own business, your plan/set of steps is:
Talking with people who made similar professional moves;
Deciding on the type of business you want to run;
Starting to experiment with creating and selling your products or services, initially as a side project;
Deciding to quit your day job and commit to your business.
While pursuing this strategy and plan, the objectives that you pay attention to are:
Level of confidence in your capability to run such a business;
Level of feasibility of your business model;
Prospective growth of revenue generated compared to current income;
Ratio of (prospective) number of hours worked to (prospective) revenue gained.
As with any (new) business, a key capability is related to GTM (go to market), a mix of sales, marketing and partnerships. So while you pursue this strategy (validate that you can run a business) and plan, you look into:
Developing your sales & marketing skills;
Developing your sales & marketing tools;
Developing your sales & marketing setup (e.g. through proper investment of time, energy, attention, money, network and other forms of capital).
In summary, each of the strategies you’re exploring has a probability of helping you achieve the goal. If you commit to a strategy and invest in implementing it, you’re increasing the probability for success or for learning that it’s not the right strategy for what you intend to achieve.
You could try doing a similar exercise given your own situation:
Where are you? (current state)
Where do you want to go? (goal)
Which ways forward or approaches (strategies) are you exploring to progress towards this goal?
Which set of concrete steps (plan) would help advance this strategy?
What tells you that you’re succeeding in walking down this road by making these steps? (objectives)
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Closing thoughts
Using these concepts is not mandatory. Connecting to the example above, living beings have figured out ways of not staying hungry since the beginnings of life - most of them without any clue of exploring strategies or clarifying plans.
At the same time, these concepts are useful tools that we have available for better clarity and results. Similar to kitchen tools, they may help us cook better dishes or, in other words, live better (professional) lives.
As a strategic adviser and lifelong learner, Bülent Duagi works with Directors in 🇷🇴 Tech companies to help them make more impact with the limited resources they have at hand, by:
🧭 having a clear strategy that enables better and faster decision making;
🤝 organizing better to both run operations and implement strategy with the available bandwidth and budgets;
🚀 implementing strategic initiatives and programs in an efficient and effective manner, paying attention to the people side of change;
⚡️ intentionally developing proper internal capabilities that are sustainable in the long run.