I watched an Instagram clip the other day. It blew me away with what I thought was an ingenious strategy. It led to a thought captured in the title of this post. And to unearth a now widespread video published by Harvard 2 years ago. It nails the thought perfectly and the title is: A plan is not a strategy.

Here is the video:

I love the points made in this video because I think too many of us get caught up in the minutiae of plans when in fact we should be focused on the strategy.

We call strategies plans all the time and confuse the two.

Here is the Instagram video. It’s actually of an advertising campaign. But it captures a good strategy which is the point.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Best Ads (@bestadspage)

While the strategy of fighting losses from ticketless passengers has been executed in a communications campaign of which you see parts in the video, the strategy is the genius part. The strategy is simple: use a train ticket to entitle buyers to participate in a lottery and drive ticket purchases in the same process.

Execution is something else

Execution is super important and ignored at your peril. Many things go into effective execution and a good plan is one of them. Many other elements are captured in the dice that you can see in the featured image of this post. Culture is not on the list but also a critical element that can scupper a good strategy, as we know.

But none of them takes the place of an effective strategy.

An effective strategy can do a lot on its own. It requires less effort on execution.

Often, we dress up the fact that we don’t have a strategy by building multiple, elaborate plans. They will never do in place of an effective strategy. We should spend more time on strategy first and then all else flows from here.