Summoning the Courage to Focus

Focus is *the* key lever of strategy but it’s so often misunderstood, and even more frequently ignored. How many times have you been in a room where focus seemed good in theory but impossible in practice?

That’s because focus is difficult. It would be easy if focus meant eliminating the bad ideas. Instead, focus is saying no to the other good ideas.

That’s what strategy really is: creating an internally consistent set of priorities that build on each other without detours. Everyone thinks they have a strategy—until a new great idea somehow makes its way onto the list.

So how do we actually summon the courage to focus and reject those good ideas? Let’s start with why we don’t.

Focus is hardest when you’re either too confident something will work—or too worried it won’t.

When you’re too confident, everything seems like a great idea! And so easy. Let’s just do it all. But in execution, you eventually realize every idea contains its own universe, with its own list of good ideas that themselves need to be prioritized.

On other hand, when you’re not sure what will work, you hedge. You spread your resources across a long list of possibilities in the hope that a few will work.

So one of the key ways to create focus is to get closer to reality and develop the appropriate amount of confidence.

For things that seem easy, ask what might make them hard. What happens if the first- or second-order effects go wrong? What assumptions are hidden about who, how, and what? A few hours of thinking - and a conversation or two with a customer or peer -can get you surprisingly far, if you approach it with well-intentioned skepticism.

On the other hand, when you’re hedging your bets because you don’t know what will work, your job is to create more certainty on what will. Or at least what is more likely to work. You must, like a scientist, lay out an expanding sets of hypotheses that build upon themselves. The task is then to as quickly as possible get enough information to move to the next layer, and ask the next question.

This all sounds simpler, both intellectually and emotionally, than it is. A clear, focused but wrong strategy might retroactively make you look like one of history’s biggest fools.

Or so you fear.

And the fact that you know your information to be imperfect will cause you to tack on another thing to the priority list. We can just do that extra thing, too.

But I encourage you not to.

Summon your courage. Reject the other good ideas.

You have the tools to do anything, but not everything.

P.S. This is all true and because life is complicated, sometimes it isn’t. I enjoyed this anecdote from Bob McGrew:

I asked him which of two features we should prioritize. We only had bandwidth for one.

“Focus on one if you have to,” he said. “But we are only going to win if you ship both. You have to figure out how.”