Strategy is a Philosophy of Becoming

In late October, as part of the launch campaign for his newest book, This Is Strategy, Seth Godin wrote an article for Harvard Business Review titled, “How to Avoid Strategy Myopia.”

A prolific writer, marketer, and business intellectual, Godin’s thinking often turns fundamental concepts upside down, and this article struck me as particularly prescient.

“Strategy is not a plan,” he writes. “A plan might come with a guarantee: ‘If we do this, we win.’ A strategy, on the other hand, comes with the motto: ‘This might not work.’ Strategy is a philosophy of becoming, a chance to create the conditions to enable the change we seek to make in the world.”

Strategy is a philosophy of becoming might be the single greatest line I’ve ever read when it comes to strategy.

What he means is that strategy emerges from the process of identifying our aspirational state and understanding the change we want to drive within our organization.

And while I hadn’t thought of strategy in those terms until I read Godin, I now see that his definition gets right to the core of what strategy is—a vision, a recalibration of self, a view on what we want our organizations to become.

Michael Porter, who wrote the seminal work on strategy, says, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

And what not to do, according to Godin (and Roger L. Martin), is plan.

Instead, we animate our philosophy.

Why Strategy Matters Now

This feels incredibly important right now because of the shift in work that’s happening due to the blindingly fast pace of AI technological advancement.

Our instincts are to plan for the future, even though the future is one that will be so fundamentally different and unrecognizable from anything we’ve experienced in the past that to try and do so is futile.

And yet, we lean hard into our plans.

We create contingency plans and growth plans and financial plans and change-management plans. And while these plans may indeed bring benefits, they are not strategy, and they’re certainly not focused on the burning question of our time, which is this: In the Age of AI, what will our organizations become?

Or, perhaps more crucially: As leaders, who will we become?

“Leaders often prefer concrete metrics that are easy to measure and simple to compare,” Godin writes, “but a useful strategy almost always begins as both inconvenient and inefficient. Strategy is based on the insight that what’s challenging now will get easier over time.”

From this, we can infer that our strategy, our philosophy of becoming, should feel uncomfortable and risky.

If it doesn’t feel hard, and at least a little bit precarious, then it’s either not a strategy, or not the right strategy.

In some ways, this flies in the face of traditional business-making, which is often about de-risking every scenario as much as possible.

But what we know deep down is that there’s a relationship between risk and reward, and most of the time, when one of them increases, so does the other.

Strategy is a philosophy of becoming.

Put another way, your theory of self, your aspirational end state, is your strategy.

Planning comes later.

For now, focus on your strategy—on who, and what, you’re becoming.