What's your strategy role - strategist, planner, or implementer?

Where are your skills strongest relative to developing and implementing strategy? What's your natural strategy role - a strategist, a planner, or an implementer?

This question emerged in a conversation with Tara Baukus Mello about our Brainzooming product development planning. As we talked, the question about someone's natural strategy role proved central to determining how conceptual and detailed our own plan should be.

What's Your Strategy Role?

Here are descriptions of the three strategy roles:

• A strategist defines the overarching direction to align and prioritize activities, even if specific strategies and tactics vary as future conditions change.
• A planner spells out concrete action steps and timing. This allows everyone to see who is doing what so they can move forward, presuming that everyone is fulfilling their own plan-related responsibilities.
• An implementer turns strategies and tactics into reality and results through doing.

Some people, based on their personal capabilities plus current assignments and strategic situations, take on more than one strategy role. For instance, a strategic implementer has the wherewithal (and prefers) to progress with more flexibility than a tightly-detailed plan allows should the underlying situation change.

No matter where you are in trying to develop and implement personal or organizational strategy, you need people playing all three strategy roles so you can move from planning to doing with success. – Mike Brown