All strategy is people strategy.

At craig+bridget, we are big fans of Nuno Espirito Santo, the manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers (well half of us are anyway). They recently played Southampton and produced two wildly different halves of football. In the first, the strategy was not implemented and they were losing, in the second it worked to spectacular effect, and they won.

In interviews after the game, Nuno revealed in typically gnomic fashion what he had done at half time with a wonderfully simple phrase (which we are thinking of making our motto when we get tired of “problems wanted”) – “words can transform actions”.

This reveals a fundamental truth about strategy.

Because lots of us think that strategy is all about thinking.

We often have processes that show how we do this thinking, sucking in loads of information at one end and launching out a beautiful strategic idea at the other. In the middle sit our brains.

Our mental model for strategy is perhaps akin to that of mathematicians or physicists, who ponder the hidden laws of the universe, revealed to them by equations. They produce ‘correct’ answers that can be tested and revealed to be true.

We have all worked with strategy people who think this way. They probably do a bit more research than you, and make you feel a little bit inadequate because they just seem to have worked harder. Their answers to strategic questions fit together like the cogs of a master clockmaker. They are correct.

But these people also often have a sadness in their eyes. A world weary disappointment, built up over many years of absolutely, totally correct strategic answers being overlooked in favour of less rigorous thinking. Decks that gather dust in their cloud drive. The road to success and profitability, unfortunately less travelled.

These people have missed the inconvenient truth of the job.

All strategy is about people.

Every strategic question you have been asked to resolve is not actually about abstract concepts and arithmetic and logic. And my goodness it’s most certainly not about getting the answer right.

All strategy is about people.

We’re not talking about customers, although those people will often get in the way of your perfect plan. No, we’re talking about all the human beings whose actions will flow from your perfect deck.

Your strategy is totally worthless if they are unmoved by your brilliance. Strategy happens in organisations, and organisations (even if they are animated by data and tech) are filled with people making decisions.

Your job is not to tell them the right answer, your job is to influence their decisions (however indirectly).

Many of us are confused by this. A lot of people who are attracted to strategy as a job can’t see the difference between the ‘right’ answer and the answer you would choose to act upon (Myers Briggs would probably categorise you as a “T”). But for the rest of us, we know that the Venn diagram overlap between “right” and “popular” can be very slim indeed.

No, your job in strategy is to work out how to motivate human beings to act differently.

Everything else is just background prep work.

You do need to work out the ‘right’ answer. But that’s barely half the job. Once you find the right answer, you then need to work out how to make it attractive and actually influence action.

For many strategists this sounds unbearably shallow. We’re not here to please people, are we? We’re here to give them the answer they don’t want to hear. Well, good luck with that. It will probably feel great, but then perhaps a little less good when nothing happens as a result.

Of course, we’re not here to be bad strategists and just tell people happy fictions that send them off on the wrong path (or as Nuno put it “not just saying easy words”). But if we are to send them on the right path, we need to spend just as much time thinking about how to make our strategic advice exciting and attractive if we actually want it to happen.

Words can transform actions.

Find the right words and go transform.