What fatherhood taught me about strategy

A child can make five minutes feel like an hour.

Especially when you are trying to leave the house.

Shoes are by the door. Bag is packed. Everyone else is ready.

And the small person standing three feet away has suddenly become deeply interested in something that has absolutely nothing to do with leaving.

My old instinct was simple:

We know what needs to happen.

So let us make it happen faster.

That instinct works poorly with children.

It also works poorly with people.

Fatherhood has made that harder for me to ignore.

There is a difference between knowing where you want someone to go and understanding what has to become true for them to get there.

Most bad strategy skips that distinction.

The person making the plan has already completed the mental journey.

They have seen the numbers.

Had the conversations.

Argued with themselves.

Discarded alternatives.

Built conviction.

Then they walk into a room and present the conclusion.

To them, the decision feels inevitable.

To everyone else, it arrived eight minutes ago.

So the strategist gets frustrated.

Why aren't they seeing it?

Why are we still debating this?

Why is this taking so long?

Because understanding has a sequence.

You cannot hand someone the last step of your reasoning and expect them to experience the first nine.

Kids make this obvious.

If a child is scared of something, telling him there is nothing to be scared of rarely changes much.

You know the room is safe.

He knows his body is telling him otherwise.

You can overpower that reality.

Or you can enter it.

You can get lower.

Look at what he is looking at.

Let him tell you what he thinks is happening.

Explain what comes next.

Give him something small he can control.

Then move together.

It takes longer right up until it saves time.

I keep seeing the same pattern at work.

A customer does not need the fifth feature.

They need to understand why changing anything is worth the disruption.

A team does not need another declaration that something is a priority.

They need to know what becomes less important because this became more important.

Someone resisting a plan may not be "resistant to change."

They may be the only person in the room who understands what the change will actually require on Tuesday morning.

Strategy gets better when you become curious about the distance between your understanding and someone else's.

Not annoyed by it.

Curious.

What do they know that I do not?

What do I know that I have not made visible?

What are they afraid will happen?

What will they have to stop doing?

What does this look like from their chair?

That last question has become one of the most useful questions I know.

From their chair.

It is easy to design a process while standing outside the process.

Easy to make a parenting decision when you are not the three-year-old being asked to live through it.

Easy to make a sales strategy that looks beautiful from the headquarters conference room.

Easy to announce a new system without being the person who has to use it forty times a day.

Fatherhood has made me more suspicious of plans that require everyone else to experience reality exactly as I do.

It has also changed the way I think about pace.

There are moments when a parent has to decide.

There are boundaries that are not negotiated.

There are times when leadership works the same way.

But urgency and force are not synonyms.

Sometimes the fastest path to movement is giving understanding enough time to catch up.

The strange thing is that slowing down at the right moment often makes everything after it move faster.

One more explanation.

One real question.

One minute at eye level.

One chance for someone else to tell you what you missed.

I used to think strategy was primarily about choosing the right direction.

I still think direction matters.

But more and more, I think strategy is also the work of making movement possible for people who did not get to live inside your head while you chose it.

You cannot rush someone else's understanding.

You can only build a better bridge to it.