“If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy. ”

Strategy is creating a unique, valuable position with a different set of activities.As a content creator, you can decide between three sources to create your strategic positioning:&nbsp;<ul><li>Serving few needs of many content consumers. </li><li>Serving broad needs of few content consumers. </li><li>Serving broad needs of many content consumers in a narrow market. </li></ul>

Create a Unique Valuable Position

Trade-offs achieve two things:&nbsp;<ul><li>Create the need for choice. </li><li>Protect against repositioners and straddlers.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li></ul>Trade-offs happen when activities are incompatible. One way to think of trade-offs is that having more of one thing requires less of another.

Make Tradeoffs — Choose What Not to Do

There are three types of fit:&nbsp;<ul><li>The first type of fit is consistency between each activity and the overall strategy.&nbsp;</li><li>The second type of fit happens when activities reinforce each other.&nbsp;</li><li>The third type of fit goes beyond activity reinforcement to optimization of effort.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li></ul>

Create Fit Among Your Activities

<ul><li>Producing and releasing lots of content isn't a strategy.&nbsp;</li><li>Increasing the quality of your content isn’t a strategy.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li></ul>

Quality and Quantity Are Not Strategies

We simplify the most relevant insights for a content creator's strategy based on What is Strategy? by Michael E. Porter to gain a competitive advantage.

Stashed ideas

The Successful Content Creator’s Strategy

John Doerr's Measure What Matters is about the importance of setting clear goals and using metrics to back them up. Doerr argues that metrics-driven OKRs (objectives and key results) have a considerable impact. In contrast, Jerry Muller's The Tyranny of Metrics shows that measuring everything destroys our schools, hospitals, police and politics. When metrics is the most important, everyone will try to "game" the numbers. E.g., schools teach to the test rather than to educate.

The use of metrics

Organisations often waste time by pursuing conflicting goals. OKRs helps to focus united efforts as it is easy to evaluate progress when goals are tied to measurable results. However, it can be a problem when goal-setting becomes an obsession. Common pitfalls to avoid:<ul><li>Do not tie metrics to compensation.</li><li>If your metrics measure the wrong thing, be open to change it.</li><li>When quality and quantity matter, add more metrics.</li></ul>

A case for metrics

One criticism of metrics is the obsession with numbers leaves no space for qualitative assessment. Numbers present a deceptive quality of objectivity. We tend to think of data as representing objective truth, but it does not always deserve the authority we give it.<ul><li>Tracking metrics can take away from the actual work.</li><li>When pressured to reach specific numbers, people will game the system.</li><li>Tying metrics to rewards and punishments destroys intrinsic motivation.</li></ul>

The tyranny of metrics

<ul><li>We can apply metrics to different domains. Muller's critiques focus mainly on not-for-profits, where Doerr directs his attention to big business (such as tech).</li><li>Metrics inspire effort but also encourage corruption. Therefore, each metric should be considered in light of trade-offs.</li><li>Using metrics and goals can increase the effectiveness of a healthy company, but the same strategy can damage people in an unhealthy organisation.</li></ul>

Consider both sides of metrics

Hyped by Silicon Valley, data-driven is the new black. Metrics allow us to quantify and solve every problem. But that’s not the whole story.

Metrics: Useful or Evil? | Scott H Young

The tools of probing the future (strategic forecasting) include microscopic as well as macroscopic components.
Geopolitical forecasting is the study of alternate futures, taking signals from the noise of today’s stories, developments and decisions.

The Crystal Ball: Probing The Future

Problem Solving

While providing a set of scenarios, four is a good number to showcase a rich set of plausible futures. 
<ul>
<li>They should ideally have the details of the likelihood or probability of the success or failure and be customized to fit the context.</li>
<li>Events of the past are generally unreliable indicators of the future due to a drastic change in the environment. </li>
<li>The scenarios listed should serve a purpose which is a low signal at present but has the potential to turn into a much higher signal in the future.</li>
<li>Any given field will have its own set of unique scenarios.</li>
</ul>

The Good Scenarios

It has two parts, with the first five steps, concentrating on which particular scenarios to work on, and the rest three steps towards the story, implications and indicators.
<ol>
<li>Focal Issue: identify what to focus on.</li>
<li>Key Factors: brainstorm about the various factors influencing the focal issue. There can be numerous obvious factors and further digging can discover the less obvious, hidden ones.</li>
<li>External Forces: there are always certain remote, unseen forces that operate on the focal issue, and can be geopolitical, economic, social or technological. This may result in 70 to 80 key factors/external forces.</li>
<li>Critical Uncertainties: by combining all forms of key factors by implementing a divergent process, the next step is to converge by allocating priority votes to the importance of each factor and the degree of uncertainty.</li>
<li>Scenario Logics: a decision is taken on which potential futures out of the curated list are to be developed into a detailed scenario.</li>
<li>Scenarios: the eligible (top trending) scenarios are then turned into a story by a single author.</li>
<li>Implications and Options: fact check and stress-test each of the scenarios is set up after a few weeks. </li>
<li>Early Indicators can be easily found in consumer behaviour or stock price fluctuation.</li>
</ol>

Scenario Planning: The Eight-Step Process

A strategy is always developed with a set of scenarios studied and selected. It requires common sense as well as experience.
Example: A strategy can be an aeroplane, and the scenarios can be the conditions under which it can fly, or which it can crash.

Strategy Vs Scenario

By Jay Ogilvy Strategic foresight can be gained through more than one lens. Beyond the microscope of simple budgeting and the macroscope of geopolitics lie still other tools for probing the future. As I settle into the role of contributor to this space, I want to explore multiple futures and multiple perspectives. [...]

Scenario Planning and Strategic Forecasting

We can only get good at chess by loving it.
Every game should teach you something. Play people better than you and be prepared to lose. Then you will learn.

How to get good at chess

Self Improvement

Start to set out the pawns, then add the pieces. Understand how a pair of bishops can dominate the board, or how rooks can take pawns in an endgame.
Once you know the basics, start using computers and online resources to play and analyse games. Don&#39;t just play against the computer - find human opponents online or in person.

The beginner chess player

Find a player you identify with and follow their careers, such as Bobby Fisher, Morphy, Alekhine, Capablanca, Tal, Korchnoi, Shirov, and other legendary figures.
They also have fascinating life stories you can get familiar with.

Study the games of great chess masters

A serious player should join their local chess club. Players can also keep their brains active online, but beware that some online players are likely to be cheating, making it hard for you to assess your play.
If you want to start playing over the board tournaments, you will need to join the chess federation in your country. After a certain number of official games, you will get a rating and can then start being paired with players of your own strength.

Joining chess clubs

You don’t have to be a polymath like Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit to improve your game

When it comes to setting strategy, there are benefits to both popular and loner strategies.<ul><li>Popular strategies are those that are identified by the crowds. The more people that choose a strategy, the better the strategy performs.</li><li>Loner strategies are those that are identified by only one person. If you want to outperform the crowd, you've got to do something the group isn't doing.</li></ul>

Two strategies

Leadership

If you want to outperform the crowd, learn the following two essential skills.<ul><li>Generate ideas by broadening your decision frame.</li><li>You must be able to distinguish between good and bad loner strategies. It is best done by embracing critical thinking.</li></ul>

Outperforming the crowd

When we need to make a decision, we tend to ask "What should we do?" However, it narrows our thinking to one right decision.If we ask the question: "What could we do?"&nbsp; it broadens our decision-making frame, because we can consider multiple futures. Could ask what if, what else, and why not.For example: Ask what would be the equivalent in your industry of something that’s working well in another.

Broadening the Frame

Strategy development and internal reviews often center on precedents, trends, and due diligence. They address"what will happen."&nbsp;&nbsp;Change the question to "what may happen" :<ul><li>Role-play other parties.</li><li>Listen to assumptions in the way a strategy is supposed to work.</li><li>Watch out for confirmation bias, overconfidence, survivor bias, and groupthink.</li><li>Forecast your competitors' results.</li><li>Beware of missing pieces in the tools you use.</li></ul>

Embracing Critical Thinking

When it comes to setting strategy, which is more effective: one great thinker or a wise crowd? To find out, I turned to my ongoing Top Pricer Tournament, in which 884 people - managers, consultants, professors, students - make pricing strategy decisions for a generic business competing against other generic businesses.

michaelporter

ALVIN TOFFLER

The Successful Content Creator’s Strategy

The use of metrics

Metrics: Useful or Evil? | Scott H Young