The Index Card Test of Strategy

A few months ago, I gave a talk about Strategic FUEL to the staff of a nonprofit organization. After hearing the framework, one of the leaders asked, “How do you know if your strategy is focused?”

The technical answer concerns (a) whether the strategy directly addresses the most important opportunities and challenges the organization faces, and (b) whether it realistically accounts for the team’s capacity to do new things. Both criteria are almost too obvious to state, but I’ve seen too many strategies that don’t fit those criteria!

All that said, there is a rudimentary way of answering the question: The Index Card Test. 

You give each team member an index card and ask them to write down what they think the strategy is. If their answers don’t fit on a single side of the index card, there’s a good chance your team’s strategy is not focused.

The Index Card Test is also a good measure of whether your team’s strategy is understandable and embedded in routines. If the strategy is referenced in the organization’s day-to-day operations, it is much more likely that the strategy will be top of mind for everyone, and that they will use the strategy to drive their work. In contrast, if the strategy is not embedded or understandable, you will see that reflected in team members having different answers or using the same words but with different meanings.

Try it out with your team. If yours is like most teams I’ve done this exercise with, you’ll be surprised by the answers! Of course, the Index Card Test doesn’t fully diagnose whether a strategy is focused, or whether it’s even the right strategy. But what’s valuable about the standard is that the small size of the index card forces a reckoning with what’s most important and what you are willing to sacrifice for those things.

In Strategic FUEL for Nonprofits, I describe eight standards for focused strategy, but perhaps the most important ones are:

• The organization has identified programs or services, customer segments, and activities that fall outside of the vision and is willing to sacrifice them to focus on the most critical areas.

• The organization has identified capabilities where it is willing to be mediocre or even weak in order to concentrate attention and resources on the most important capabilities. 

When I see teams developing strategies, their unwillingness to surface and make these choices is the primary cause of bloated, less focused strategies, which are more challenging to implement.

If you try this exercise, please let me know how it goes.

There’s a saying that If everything is important, nothing is important.

In my experience, the better line is: If everything is important, nothing will get done.