Thinking Strategy, Pt.1

I’ve been involved in a lot of strategic thinking lately, both for clients and workshops (e.g. my mobile strategy workshop at DevLearn next week), and so it’s forced me to reflect on what strategy is.

I’ve previously talked about the technology components of an elearning strategy, and how they tie together, but I need to take another cut at it.  Naturally, I’ve been diagramming as my way to get my mind around strategy as a set of conceptual components that are necessary to identify and get right, regardless of domain.

A strategy has to start with a vision of what you’re trying to achieve.  From there, you need to break it down into goals that, together would achieve this outcome.

Multiple things go along with this: the tactics that achieve the goals, the metrics that you use to measure your progress and success, the partners you need to work with, the resources you’ll need, the continual development of capability of the resources, and the  messaging you’ll use to get others to buy in and assist.

It goes further, of course.  Stay tuned for tomorrow.