This is the seventh post in a series – start here.
There will never be enough time, tools, people, or other resources to achieve everything you want to do – especially in the face of everything that everybody else wants to do.
The practice of strategy helps us live with this scarcity by managing it:
- Eliminating possibilities, either permanently…
- or for a time (structuring your work)…
- both of which are ways of focusing resources…
- which will allow you to get more done…
- or gather more resources…
- so that you can get more done in future…
- like some kind of glorious snowball.
Strategy asks, given that there will never be enough time, tools, people or other resources – and given what other people want to do – what shall we do?
I think it’s a Craig Groeschel thing talking about scarcity that has stuck with me. What hit home for me was how scarcity can be a wonderful thing for our strategic planning. Scarcity forces us to consider options both in vision and strategy that we may not have necessarily seen before. I can mean we can become more effective and efficient both in the short and the long term.
It forces us to ask:
What could we best do?
What should we be doing?
What could only we do?
When I have lots of resources (rare!) it can be easy to become lazy, to not ask the difficult questions. Scarcity ups the ante and can be so helpful