In a commencement speech, David Foster Wallace shares the following parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

So I would love to tell you about the moment that I discovered water.

I was at a networking event about four years ago and introduced myself to a fellow B-Corp strategy director as the “Director of Strategy and Operations”. This was a new title for me, and I was very proud of it, and so when she LAUGHED I was like ???? and THEN she said: “director of operations and strategy……. so, you do everything?”

I had no witty comeback. In fact I had no comeback at all. I was sitting there with the most “wait, is this water?” moment I’ve ever had in my professional life.

Because 1) she was right but also 2) um, yes?? It’s always been that way, I’m pretty sure that’s how I got this role in the first place?

My ten-years-ago self, running a Student Activities team on institutional knowledge and a dream, would have taken that a step further:

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Isn’t "everything" just… what we do in higher ed and nonprofit? Isn’t everyone responsible for figuring out and translating the big picture AND the medium picture AND turning all of that into the daily tasks your team needs to run all while working out of a Google Sheet called “Team Tasks.xls”??

Friends, I have to tell you, because I was grateful that SHE told ME: NO! NOT everyone is in charge of all that. In fact, in a lot of organizations, these responsibilities live in separate departments, on separate floors, cooked up by separate people who don’t know each other.

I’m not saying that’s a best practice, but I’m saying not everyone can do what we do.

I had been doing the work of a strategy department, an ops department, AND a management layer – AND because I had no peers (in that particular org, I reported directly to the CEO and everyone else reported to me), there was literally no one who could hold up a mirror and say “hey, do you know what you’re doing?”

I learned how to work that way in higher ed, and it took a peer to recognize it. (That’s the thing about water. The fish is usually the last one to see it.)

The ultimate goal

We talked last week about the age-old distinction between strategy & tactics: the idea that “strategy” isn’t the goal, it’s the scaffold that gets you to the goal. It’s the road, not the destination.

Here’s another way to think about it:

“The ultimate goal isn’t just to have a good strategy. The goal is to act strategically.”

This means, of course, that the intermediate step – the thing you actually have to develop and practice – is learning to think strategically.

And here’s where we want to gently push back on the cultural image of what that looks like. When a lot of people hear “strategic thinking”, they’re thinking: DON DRAPER! WHITEBOARDS! Someone yelling into a phone about the Q4 projections and the merger and all these other things that keep you from feeling you know how to do this (bc you just work with people, right?).

But some of the most genuinely strategic moves I’ve ever witnessed (or made) look a lot more like:

  • Someone brings you a problem and says we need to fix this immediately and you pause for a beat and realize you need to ask: IS that the problem? Or is it a symptom?
  • Sitting in a meeting and thinking: yep, we should solve that, but not before we solve this other thing, which is more directly tied to our goals.

When we first started thinking about our Three Lenses of Leadership Thinking (critical + strategic + creative), one of the things Alli kept reminding us of was the idea of discernment. And THAT’S discernment: the beat to think, to tie what’s in front of you back to your strategic plan, and figure out which road to keep taking.

Discernment is exactly the intersection of critical and strategic thinking, and it's a muscle we know how to develop.

What changes when you build the muscle

When we talk about discernment, we’re talking about how developing this skill changes something pretty fundamental about how you move through your work.

You’ve heard people talk about “firefighting”, I’m sure? Discernment is how you stop being reactive – aka firefighting – and start being able to triage work back to objectives. It’s how you see perspective: what led to this, what will come from this moment, and what decisions can I make right now that will shape what comes next?

In short, discernment enables you to fully embody both critical and strategic thinking.

You also (our favorite part) start to be able to help your team see themselves in the strategy! Transformational leadership reminds us that motivating teams through the vision happens in how we approach the work every day; strategic thinking is more connected to this effort than we might think. In the end, strategy is objectively critical, subjectively near and dear to our hearts, AND it only works if we (and our teams) make it work.

PS: Strategic Planning dropped in Manager’s Lab on March 1, and if any of this is resonating – triage, discernment, motivating your team through vision-based leadership – this is exactly what we’re working through. Join anytime and get access to everything in the Lab: Strategic Planning, plus the full back catalog, including Building Managerial Systems (February’s drop).

1-Minute Tool: Strategic Pause

Next time someone brings you a problem, take a pause before you start solving, and ask yourself these four questions:

  1. What is this connected to? What else in the organization feels threaded into this?
  2. Is what’s being reported the actual problem? If not, how might I reframe it? (e.g. “symptom-of” thinking)
  3. Is now the right time to solve it, or is there something more foundational that needs to shift first?
  4. Who else needs to understand this problem for us to move forward effectively?

As always, if you brain wants to skip a question, make a note – that’s probably connected to the muscle you’re building.

Discernment > firefighting, always.

Final thought

We spend a lot of time talking to folks on this list about what your job MEANS, in the context of what you can do that a lot of other people can’t. Part of the reason we do this is because when you’re the fish, you can’t ever see the water. So here’s something that was really helpful to me during my last two years in higher ed (which I lovingly refer to as my “full tilt” period because of how hard I tried to develop my management skills to push the bar upward for everything my team and I did):

The fact that you’ve been doing all of this – strategy, operations, management, facilitation – when in many cases those responsibilities are separated out to different people, if not different TEAMS? That makes your role a proving ground. (A manager’s lab, if you will!) You experiment with this stuff every day.

The people who have had to wear every hat are the ones that see how the hats fit together. You know what a strategy looks like when it is (or isn’t) connected to operations. You know what happens when leadership loses sight of the mission. You’ve felt it, lived it, and maybe even started to shape a point of view around it.

That’s not nothing. It’s tremendous. In fact – as my fellow B Corp director reminded me four years ago – it’s actually THE thing.