Strategy as Choice: Why Judgment and Discernment Could Make or Break Your Leadership

Regardless of your fiscal year and corresponding planning cycle, turning the page on the annual calendar tends to refocus our attention on personal as well as organizational development. One of the critical aspects of organizational development is strategic planning.

Some Christ-following leaders struggle to find the balance between depending on God and developing a plan. Much of this confusion could be eliminated if we simply understood strategy as a series of choices leaders make in the pursuit of their vision. To suggest Christ-following leaders should not employ strategy is the same as saying we should not make the most important choices facing the organizations we lead. Strategy is choice at work whether you call it that or not.

To quote A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin, in their book, Playing to Win, “Strategy…requires making explicit choices—to do some things and not others—and building a business around those choices.” Every leader, whether you are a business person, pastor, mission CEO, team leader, or somewhere in between, has to make choices that will define the course of action you take in pursuit of your God-given vision. This is the heart of strategy.

The process of organizing and integrating these choices is how you develop a strategic planning model. If you don’t do anything to organize and integrate the choices you make about the future of your organization you are using an ad hoc planning model that regardless of your spirituality, is going to produce inconsistent results. In this month’s vlog, Steve Moore shares about Strategy as Choice and why judgment and discernment could make or break your leadership.

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