More than one year ago while I was still studying, I wrote this short post called Uncle Mark’s Fourth Duvel. The purpose, back then, was to motivate myself to gain a clearer understanding of a field that is open to many interpretations within a fast-paced industry: strategy in service design.

Nowadays, I am working in an agency in London as an Experience Strategist and I have to admit that things are still not crystal clear.

I have the feeling that our industry is partly to blame. First, there are too many personal definitions floating around. If you’d ask ten strategists to define in one sentence what it is they do, you’ll get two similar answers. Secondly, I believe that our future-facing industry feels the constant urge to redefine the unnecessary. Adding a super fluffy word like “experience”, is not going to facilitate the wedding conversation you’re having with your tipsy uncle.

Recently, I found out that the reason for this confusion partly lies within myself and my inability to see the red thread between many stories. I felt the need to connect and simplify in order to clarify.

Why, how and what? Simon Sinek

One model I find very intruiging is Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. Mostly because it makes you go beyond a definition, right into the motivational zone.

Simon Sinek’s model helps businesses leaders to reflect about their purpose in order to align their activities to that purpose. When your purpose is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, you’ve created a framework on which you can plant your how (by creating a kickass culture of smart creatives) and what (Gmail, Google Images, Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Loon, etc.)

The concept of Simon’s circle also works especially well if you want to distinguish the most essential from the most redundant. In other words, you can use it as a tool to understand more by noting down less.

I have decided to try to come up with an answer to what are, according to me, the three most relevant questions I can ask myself this point in time:

What is strategy?

How do you do strategy?

Why do you need a strategy?

What is strategy?

Probably the best definition out there is what Richard Rumelt calls “the kernel of strategy” in his book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.

The kernel contains three elements and is very straightforward:

1/ A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.