Thinkydoers Episode 33

Ever feel like you're speaking a different language than your colleagues when presenting your ideas?

Or, like a square peg in your work?

Do you feel like you're trying to read minds to understand what's expected of you, while your co-workers are just humming along doing their work? 

Or, do you lead people who that describes well?

In this powerful episode, Sara Lobkovich reveals why the very qualities that might make some people feel like an outsider at work—being "too analytical" or "too detail-oriented"—could actually be their greatest strategic strengths (and a tremendous asset to the organizations they work within).

In today's Thinkydoers short, hear a preview of the Introduction to Sara's upcoming book: 

You Are A Strategist: Use No-BS Objectives and Key Results to Get Big Things Done

"You Are A Strategist" isn't just another theoretical strategy book. It's a practical playbook for people who think differently about work and want to make real change happen. Through frameworks like the Connected Strategic One-Pager and No-BS OKRs, you'll discover how to transform your strategic insights into clear, compelling direction that others can actually follow, without getting lost in politics or burning out.

Drawing from her experience training over 2,000 OKR coaches across more than 300 organizations globally, Sara shares a human-centered approach to strategy that works for everyone—not just those with traditional business backgrounds or positions of power. Whether you're in the C-Suite, a chief of staff, a program manager, a product manager, a project lead, department director, or high-performing individual contributor (or beyond!), this episode will help you unlock your inner strategist and make your unique impact.

Episode Highlights:

• Why being "strategic" isn't about being smart or having a specific job title

• The five key questions that identify strategic thinkers

• How to recognize and empower strategic thinkers in your organization

• Why ideas alone aren't enough in today's business environment

• Introduction to Connected Strategic One-sheet and No-BS OKRs

• The science behind goal-setting and motivation

Episode Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Thinkydoer Shorts

00:39 Introduction to 'You Are A Strategist'

01:28 Dedication and Audience

01:53 Identifying Strategists

02:25 Challenges and Misconceptions

04:29 Defining Strategy and Strategists

10:17 The Role of Ideas in Strategy

12:18 Implementing Strategic Goals

19:39 The Connected Strategic One Sheet and No BS OKRs 26:57 Conclusion and Next Steps

Notable Quotes:

[00:05:00] "The job isn't to convince people that you're a smart person; it's to clarify situations so everyone can do the smart thing." (Referencing a quote by Rob Estreitinho of Salmon Labs)

[00:07:00] "If you read books and research papers for fun and delight in spotting ways that wildly disparate information connects to create new ideas and approaches, that might be you."

[00:09:00] "Good strategy makes the work better, but you don't see the strategy itself. The strategy is the scaffolding that the stuff you ultimately see rests on."

[00:12:00] "If anyone is to have any hope of solving the major organizational, cultural, and existential problems we all face together today, insightful, curious, linky brains are an asset."

[00:16:00] "In today's market and work world, every person can operate strategically, no matter how senior or tactical your role. Strategy is clear expectations."

[00:24:00] "Strategy achievement, at its core, is human behavior change. Psychological research in the motivation sciences fields shows that human behavior change relies heavily on the creation of specific, actionable goals and a learning-focused approach."

Key Takeaways:

• Strategy is about clarifying situations so everyone can do the smart thing

• Strategic thinking is independent of job title or role

• Good strategy makes work better but often remains invisible

• Clear expectations and empirical measurements are crucial for success

• Strategy achievement is fundamentally about human behavior change

Resources Mentioned:

• You Are A Strategist book: youareastrategist.com

• No-BS OKRs Workbook (PDF download): https://findrc.co/4ggdAtz

• Newsletter signup: findrc.co/newsletter

Find full show notes and the episode transcript via https://findrc.co/thinkydoers !

Full Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00]

Sara: Welcome to Thinkydoer Shorts, where we embrace anti-perfection and dive straight into the messy middle of strategy, leadership, and personal and career growth.

I'm your host, Sara Lobkovich, creator of No-BS Objectives and Key Results,

host of the Thinkydoers podcast,

and I'm a strategy coach, big time goal nerd, and board certified

 health and wellness coach with a focus on work life well-being. And in the next few minutes, we'll explore a current topic or insight to spark your curiosity and provide you a pragmatic starting place to take action.

Let's dive in.

 Hello and welcome to an unconventional, maybe not so short, Thinkydoer Short.

the purpose for this is I'm recording the introduction to my upcoming book, You Are A Strategist: Use No BS Objectives and Key Results to Get Big Things Done today.

[00:01:00] The information about the book is in the little pop up on the little banner on the screen right now. You can find more information at youareastrategist.com, and all material in this recording is copyright Sara Lobkovich for Red Currant Collective LLC, all rights reserved.

 You Are A Strategist: Use No BS Objectives And Key Results To Get Big Things Done. By Sara Lobkovich. This book is dedicated to introverts, ADHDers, people with autism and autistic traits, trauma survivors, strategy brain square pegs, frustrated changemakers, Rebelutionaries, and Thinkydoers. To everyone who's ever heard the words, "You need to be more strategic, or you're over complicating this," You are not alone, and together we can change the world.

Think of yourself, and those who work for you, and those you work with. How [00:02:00] would you or they answer all these questions? Is it important to you for your work to have purpose? Are you curious, sometimes to a fault? Do you tend to challenge the status quo, in big or little ways? Do you intuitively make connections that other people don't? And are you comfortable with the risks of intentional experimentation? If you lead people who would say yes to these questions, you may recognize them as some of your most challenging reports. High potential, perhaps, and also hard to manage. If you yourself are saying yes to these questions, this could explain why you might be experiencing challenges in your career, especially with authority figures. You may have left jobs or even been fired because of a mismatch between your leadership or organizational culture and what you need to feel engaged, empowered, and [00:03:00] successful. You may also have been brought into roles with the promise of innovation and transformation, only to find the organization doesn't really have the appetite, stomach, or culture to make it happen. You may begin each role excited, highly motivated, and sure that this time will be different, only to end disillusioned, disappointed, and wondering what you did wrong. What's running through your head right now as I read that to you? If you're a leader who's thinking, "How could anyone live like that?" then I'm really glad you're here. A significant percentage of the people you lead or work with live exactly like that and need your understanding and support to do their best work. These pages will give you a set of tools to maximize the folks described above as powerful agents of growth, innovation, and transformational change for your organization, if you have the [00:04:00] stomach for it. On the other hand, if you're one of the many people thinking, "I thought it was just me," then I'm here to tell you, it is not just you. We are everywhere. The list of questions above encapsulates my own early career experience, and I now hear those concepts echoed day in and day out, over and over, from those in my courses and workshops and the folks I work with as a strategy coach.

So, how do I know you're a strategist? The profession of strategy is a funny one. Very few people decide, "I want to be a strategist when I grow up." And aside from Mad Men, it's not like there are many role models in the space. And while Mad Men is an easy job, eerily accurate depiction of agency life in any era (which I know is shocking), it's not exactly the model I want to [00:05:00] perpetuate.

So, let's talk for a minute about what being a strategist is not. First, strategy is not being smart. For too long, leaders and workplaces have conflated strategic and smart. Thanks to Rob Estreitinho, the founder and head of strategy at Salmon Labs, and one of my favorite sources on modern strategic thought, we now have this important clarification: The job isn't to convince people that you're a smart person; it's to clarify situations so everyone can do the smart thing. Second, having a strategist job title is not being a strategist. In my three-decade-plus career, I've held and hired for numerous roles with strategist in the name that were purely executional, and where strategic thinking was sometimes even wholly unwelcome. So, just having a [00:06:00] strategist job title does not make you a strategist. Being a strategist is completely separate from your job title or industry.

You may be a strategist who works as a dishwasher, playing word games in your brain while you wash dishes. You may be a strategist who teaches elementary school, observing your students and adapting your teaching approaches based on the data you take in about each kid and how they learn. And yes, you may be a strategist who sits in a chair in an office with the title Chief Strategy Officer on the nameplate outside the door, for sure. But here, we're democratizing the role of strategist. You are a strategist if you gather facts and observations about the world around you and use them to fuel insights. And insights are truths that resonate with a person or group of people and spark them to think differently or take some kind of [00:07:00] action.

You may have come pre-programmed with a cognitive style that does this naturally. If you read books and research papers for fun and delight in spotting ways that wildly disparate information connects to create new ideas and approaches, that might be you. If you came pre-programmed with a strategist brain, that's only part of the puzzle. Now, you have to learn how to communicate those unique insights in ways that other people who are not wired the way you are can understand and engage with. To recruit others to your causes, you must somehow help them understand how you connected the dots, which can be harder than it sounds. If you're thinking you did not come pre-programmed with a strategist brain, I hope this book provides a set of tools and practices to help you poke around inside yourself and meet and unblock your own inner strategist. Because if you think back [00:08:00] to an earlier point in your life, before school and society conditioned it out of you, you probably had a chapter where you were curious and questioning like it was your job. That little you asking, "why?" So many times that your parent finally snapped back, "Because I said so," and slammed the door on the conversation. That little you is still inside of you. And that little you, before that door slam, is who this book is for.

Any person can wield the tools coached here to enable their inner strategist to speak up for change with a higher likelihood of success when that's what's called for. The strategist in me recognizes the strategist in you. So, now that we agree that you are a strategist, this book is designed especially for you to enable you to communicate the insights from your book. beautiful brain in ways others can rally behind. Because if you're [00:09:00] going to change the world as only you can, the odds are very low that you can do it by yourself. You need a team. The folks who relate to the five questions at the start of this introduction are traditionally critical behind-the-scenes players, playing a large role in the actual getting stuff done of many organizations. Someone has to dive into the details to do the research, make the plans, design the products, spot and predict which issues might turn into a crisis, and figure out how to mitigate them. Then calmly and thoughtfully move those crises. Then calmly and thoughtfully move through those crises that do happen, playing while running all the possible scenarios and making the best decisions they can with the information they have. A lot of this work has been invisible. In fact, in the field of advertising, to say about a piece of creative that the strategy is showing means someone [00:10:00] didn't do their job.

Good strategy makes the work better, but you don't see the strategy itself. The strategy is the scaffolding that the stuff you ultimately see rests on. The strategy is created, and then the visible work begins. So let's talk for a minute about the role of ideas. In the corporate environment, ideas often get all the glory. Big, shiny new thinking can be the right tool for the job, especially when there are work challenges for which it makes sense to gather together and ideate, to develop and build out an idea through something like improv, a "yes, and" process of exploration, joint creation, and collaboratively building alignment that is more imaginative than necessarily having to be logical. The team creates and iterates together until they arrive at a finished product. The decision-maker gives their feedback, changes are [00:11:00] incorporated, and the work is produced and published. But each idea is a gamble. You might win big, or you might lose big. Often, the methods for evaluating and testing ideas are largely subjective. "Do I like this idea? Do you think this idea will work? What does the focus group say? Do we have the right focus group?" And on and on. In a business environment where people and organizations are doing more with less, with the need to build nimble, adaptable organizations to keep up with a world changing faster than ever any of us can keep track of, having the best idea is not good enough. It's hard to ignore the role that power and privilege play in the subjective assessment of ideas. When ideas are made the hero, opportunity, rewards, and recognition are not equally accessible to everyone. Increasingly, it's the folks who relate to the earlier five [00:12:00] questions who are stepping out from the shadows and into the spotlight. If anyone is to have any hope of solving the major organizational, cultural, and existential problems we all face together today, insightful, curious, linky brains are an asset. Today, leaders and individuals alike must be able to show their work to strategize a path that establishes processes and goals to make those ideas a reality. So let's unblock your inner strategist. If you are a CEO responsible for delivering specific performance to a board or the market, you cannot afford the risk of making important decisions about your product, service, or business based on ideas alone. You, my friend, must do your homework. You must be able to trace your ideas back to data that is reasonable, logical, and can be understood by others. If you're a business [00:13:00] leader, you may sit six levels or more from the person implementing your business's core work. You need a way to facilitate collaboration and performance through communicating clear expectations with enough context to enable people you may never even sit in the same room with to deliver on your vision without them having to be psychic. If you're an implementer, you may be responsible for delivering empirically measurable results that have never been communicated to you as clear expectations. You can wing it, doing your best to mind-read and follow the directions that you have been given by your leaders, or you can take the steering wheel and accept responsibility for identifying your own potential measurable contributions to the organization's strategy. If you are self-employed or pursuing a big vision in any area of your life, you'll exhaust yourself by running with every [00:14:00] idea that comes to mind. In entrepreneurial and visionary brains, ideas are like balls coming at you from a pitching machine without a regulator, flying at you so fast you can't even manage to swing at every one. You need some way to corral your big ideas and possibilities down to a workable direction. An aligned set of expectations, and a plan. Those are the skills you'll learn in this book. You'll learn how to create your vision and identify objective metrics that indicate progress toward that vision. You'll learn how to think big, how to develop insights based on strategic inputs, facts, and observations that pinpoint how you and your organization can do better. Few, if any, strategists or strategic leaders come pre-programmed with these skills and competencies. Learning this straightforward toolkit, including a simple, usable, Connected Strategic One-sheet, and No-BS [00:15:00] Objectives and Key Results, will get you where you want to go. If you aren't yet a leader in strategic development, the practices you'll learn here will arm you to operate more strategically, to make better choices so your time is focused on outcomes, not just activity, and to ask and answer important questions, enabling your team to align with your vision. What impacts or results are most important to achieve? Why do they matter? Why do they matter now? What might be possible to achieve? What could it mean to succeed wildly? How will you know empirically that you're making progress? What have you learned, or what are you learning? You'll build your strategic skill set based on iteratively answering important questions like the above, which yield greater focus, clarity, and confidence, alignment, and less unhealthy conflict and wasted time, [00:16:00] energy, and frustration for everyone involved. And that is how you unblock your inner strategist.

There is a reason this book is called You Are a Strategist, not Are You a Strategist? In today's market and work world, every person can operate strategically, no matter how senior or tactical your role. Strategy is clear expectations. Companies spend millions of dollars every year on in-house labor and consulting services to build elegant, lengthy, smart strategy decks, only to have them promptly saved to a file-sharing site where they are rarely ever opened — until the company begins the process all over again in one, or three, or five years. The company might then spend countless hours and dollars on project management systems and operational consulting in their efforts to become more agile and to increase their [00:17:00] effectiveness. They might spend days in off-sites and more dollars on HR consultants to try to learn how to improve their culture and impact. But somehow, when they get back to the office, the momentum evaporates and it's business as usual. Those well-intentioned project plans generate a lot of activity and output, but they may never yield the strategic outcomes the organization needs. How do I know? I spent the first act of my strategy career working for companies that fit that description, and sometimes being part of the problem myself. My colleagues and I were the ones crafting those compelling stories, building those beautiful decks, then working with our collaborators to deliver the work itself. Almost every time, though, we were missing a critical piece of the puzzle: clear, objective alignment with the client on what success actually meant. Sometimes, that became apparent at the beginning. We'd [00:18:00] gather for our kickoff and find out that the client's real world was significantly different than what they'd told us during discovery. The work we'd pitched and won looked nothing like the work that needed to be done. Sometimes, we'd have a little honeymoon of alignment, and then during implementation, we'd become mired in round after round of review with increasingly unhappy and frustrated clients whose unspoken or unclear expectations were not being met. Sometimes, we'd get all the way through the creation to launching the work. We'd pat ourselves on the back for a job well done that would make a beautiful case study for our portfolio and win industry awards,and the client would let us know that they were dissatisfied because the work didn't achieve the outcomes they imagined, but had never clearly communicated, or even didn't know how to communicate. My motivation and confidence [00:19:00] dipped with each passing day whenever there wasn't an agreed empirical measuring stick for our work together. The more this happened, the more I felt there had to be a better way. And I was right! Over years of exploration, study, experimentation, and trial and error, I've developed that better way. And as of now, it's worked with client organizations that have a combined annual economic impact of over 15 billion in revenue, along with an additional 300+ organizations implementing some elements of this approach based on my trainings and workshops. And those numbers are and counting.

The better way explained in this book, The Connected Strategic One Sheet and No BS OKRs Process, enables changemakers like you to pave a clear path to impact. Unlike other approaches that can take weeks or months to implement, My workshop participants routinely complete the exercises in this book from start to finish [00:20:00] over the course of three to maybe six hours absolute max during a one- to two-week period. It's really usually between 90 minutes and three or four hours these days. So, that's right: in two weeks or less, you can lay the foundation for increased strategic impact and career satisfaction and fulfillment. While you're at it, you're about to become the strategist Your organization and career has always needed. These pages contain two big shifts that you need to know. First, how to create a single-page connected strategy that distills your organizational strategy down to one usable page. And second, how to fill gaps in your strategic vision by implementing a coherent alignment layer to benefit your organization. The first shift means creating a connected strategic one sheet, the tool that I started using with clients to make their organizational strategy actually useful on a day-to-day basis. The [00:21:00] second shift includes a specific new approach to the widespread methodology known as Objectives and Key Results, and that approach is what I call No BS OKRs. No BS OKRs are a straightforward, simple approach to creating and achieving Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs. No BS OKRs have two parts. First, clear, visionary, directional objectives. And second, empirically measurable key results, progress and outcome targets that align us on what success means and reveal whether we're on or off track. No BS OKRs transform innovation-driven environments where performance hinges on improving human experience, not just making numbers look good. When you put into practice what you learn here, you'll clear the path for impact by yourself and your collaborators. You'll be able to empower change, skip the chaos, [00:22:00] and dive straight into effective, impactful goal setting, boost innovation, foster culture that values experimentation, creative solutions, and learning. You'll also be able to quantify success, communicate expectations, and measure impact far beyond the business measures you're thinking about today. So this book is your invitation into an innovative, rewarding, often misunderstood and highly gatekept area of business: the world of organizational strategy. Strategy is your goals. If you're already a professional strategist, you might be scratching your head about why this book is so focused on goals when goal setting is not always part of a strategist's remit. The explanation is motivation science. During my career as a creative agency strategist, every pitch I worked on started with goal setting. A lengthy discussion would then yield the same two goals: first, win the work, [00:23:00] and second, do work that would get the client promoted. The problem was, even doing our very best work, our influence on those two goals was unbearably low. An agency can win the work in the sales room and lose it due to red tape in the procurement process. There are countless factors unrelated to our work that go into our client's performance evaluation. Those goals didn't give us clarity about what was important with this particular pitch or alignment on our purpose with this particular work. I found myself in a deep, demotivated burnout. I loved my work, but the profound subjectivity was incompatible with my brain chemistry. I started to wonder, what if we identified some other goals? What if we identified some selfish goals that mattered to us as professionals, that got us excited and motivated? So that even if we lost the work for [00:24:00] some reason beyond our control, we still had a chance at satisfaction on our own self-motivated goals, over which we also might have a little bit more influence. So, I tried it. Working in line with those early experimental self-set goals, I started to feel a strange new sense of confidence and self-esteem. My engagement with my work rebounded, my frustration diminished, and my collaboration with colleagues and leaders became less stressful. At the time, I didn't know what was happening. I just knew that the more I focused on self-set quantifiable goals, the happier I was at work. Fast forward nearly a decade, and now, after years of specialty work in goal setting, operationalizing for goal attainment, and professional training in the art and science of human behavior change, It all makes sense. Now I know that those early spontaneous experiments were consistent with decades of motivation science on goal setting and human [00:25:00] behavior change. And strategy achievement, at its core, is human behavior change. Psychological research in the motivation sciences fields shows that human behavior change relies heavily on the creation of specific, actionable goals and a learning-focused approach.

In this book, you'll learn my methods for creating goals that increase learning, problem-solving, self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, engagement, the duration of goal pursuit, and other benefits that ultimately lead to higher performance. I'm a firm believer in the power of the practices in this book, not only to set goals, but to transform the very mechanisms by which you'll achieve them, no matter what your industry, your organization size, or the stage of your career. Strategy is non-linear, and so is this book. This book is divided into three parts, providing a fully connected, complete toolkit for creating and [00:26:00] achieving important strategic goals. Every chapter ends with a TL;DR of strategic takeaways. This book explains how to distill your strategy down to a single page to hold yourself to achieving what's most important. How No BS OKRs, the specific implementation approach I created and work with, can improve your leadership and career effectiveness. to create clear, focused, aligned OKRs for your team and yourself, as well as advanced skills for the big thinker? By learning those skills, you'll become better acquainted with your own inner strategist and be ready to lead from the back or any other chair in the office. In today's ever-changing business world, if you follow the pattern my clients do, you'll do so while increasing employee engagement, your own career impact, and your own career fulfillment.

 Alright, that's the introduction. Thank you [00:27:00] so much for tuning in for this little experiment in live broadcasting the introduction of the book.

If you'd like more information about my upcoming book, You Are a Strategist, you can visit youareastrategist.com. And don't forget, the companion workbook is available right now as a PDF download. You can find that on my main website, the easiest way to find a shortcut to it is to go to findrc.co I

​Sara: All right, friends, That's it for today.

Stay in the loop with everything going on around here by visiting findrc.co/newsletter and joining my mailing list.

Got questions? My email addresses are too hard to spell, so visit findrc.co/contact and shoot me a note that way. You'll also find me at @saralobkovich on most of your favorite social media platforms.

For today's show notes, visit findrc.co/thinkydoers. If there's someone you'd like featured on this podcast, drop me a note. And if you know other Thinkydoers who'd benefit from this episode, please share. Your referrals, your word of mouth, and your reviews are much appreciated. I'm looking forward to the questions this episode sparks for you, and I look forward to seeing you next time.