Have strategic patience and “be right a lot”

These days, I am spending my time in Spain with my girlfriend’s family. Her father is an Admiral of the Spanish Navy. We were having a totally random conversation and he asked me: “Do you want to know something I always tell in my direct reports? I tell them they have to learn the art of Strategic Patience.”

He explained to me what he meant and that caught my attention so much because I was in the middle of preparing a note about long term impact and the two concepts were incredibly similar, just put with different words. So I decided to scratch that note and rewrite it by using this concept: strategic patience. It perfectly applies with what I meant.

What’s strategic patience?

Strategic patience means “to remain vigilant while waiting with patience for the expected results to come, as a result of your implemented action plan”. There are three important concept in this:

• Implement Action plan (strategy)
• Remain vigilant (observe)
• Wait for the results (patience)

Strategy

A strategy is a plan that you make by aggregating and organizing informed decisions you’ve made about solving a business, product, org, company or market problem.

You need to make sure strategies are a full-time commitment, and as such you don’t scratch them every time to recreate new ones — instead, make sure you update them when needed by moving fast and stay on top of the market.

When you choose a strategy, you need to make sure you are right. You need to do all your best and think thoroughly before agreeing on something, and back-up your decisions based on the best available data.

Continuously changing strategy risk to make an organization weak, because it ends up focusing on the short term aspects and never on the long term part.

Observe

You need to be a great observer. When you are a data driven company and try to make decisions based on data analysis, you are on the right path for success. Little or something is left to the gut feeling.

Observing allows you to make sure your strategy is working. It’s somehow something similar to a feedback loop: you send an input to the system, you get an output, you observe it, and finally you decide if your “system” needs to be changed and how.

To be clear: everybody can still make mistakes after observing, but if you don’t observe you will make a mistake for sure. That’s why I’ve always advocated for relentless monitoring, logging and alarming. There’s nothing you should do without these three things.

Remember: observe your results and be ready to act.

Patience

Here’s my main solution to applying a long term plan: you must be patient. You can’t build everything in one day. You can do certain things in one day, but you certainly can’t go from 0 to 1 in one day. 0 to 1 requires patience (together with what we’ve just discussed so far).

Let me give you an example: let’s say you’re creating Twitter. You had this amazing idea and you’re implementing it. Your goal is to let the whole world, as many people as possible, use your product. How long do you think it takes to reach that goal? If for 1 year you haven’t seen much growth, do you think you should change the target so that it’s better achievable? You need to be patient. If you have done the right strategy, you are observing and you have a customer oriented mentality there’s nothing to panic.

My final motto is: be patient while observing your strategy being implemented. That’s another way to think that you need to focus on long term plans.