Structural Tension Charts

How do you do your best strategic thinking? Are there any tools or methods that you find particularly helpful?

There are tools that I use. My brain naturally thinks in terms of structural tension charts. What I mean by that; there’s three pieces to it. One is, here’s my current reality, here’s my desired future state. I want to get from here to here. And then the third part is I create a path between the current reality and the desired future state. And so that’s a pretty simple model. But it’s amazing to me how many people just start to stumble into, “I think I could tweak this. I think I could tweak that. I think I could improve that,” and they haven’t established a vision, they haven’t defined success.
And so I think one of the key parts of this structural tension chart and it’s a step that I see a lot of people missing, is to really clearly define: we will be successful when these things happen. And that clarity in outcomes is what helps you in the path, because often when a task is complicated, you’ll set out a path, but then you’ll realize as you’re going through, it’s like, “Oh, no, I need to go a little bit left, I need to go a little bit right.”
And the thing that guides you is the saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.” But you have to know where you’re going, you have to know what your final destination is. And too frequently, people just sort of dive into something and it’s hazy and fuzzy as to what success looks like. Which is why going back to my discussion about our mission and how we pursue our mission, we made a point of quantifying it. It isn’t just words that have meaning and resonance for us. Its affordability means we hit these numbers, quality that’s worthy of our family and friends means we get to these clinical quality scores. And everyone is clear, that is success. That is what we’re striving for.
So, as we’re meandering through our path, if we have to angle left, angle right or move in some way, we’re constantly looking at where we need to go and what success looks like. And to me, that’s the most important thing when you’re developing a vision or a strategy, is defining success.