What is a trustworthy strategy?

Trust thought for today - So much about trust in organisations is about having clarity of purpose, a clear strategy and delivering on it in a way which is inclusive, open and honest. But what actually is a strategy?

I was having a chat recently with a senior person in a large organisation and we both sheepishly had to admit, that we couldn't 100% nail what a strategy was. Everyone talks about strategy, (and there is so much bllx written by 'strategy' consultants) but they seem to mean different things and we weren't convinced many of those bandying the word about knew half the time either!

I was listening to Henry Dimbleby on The Food Programme last week, he explained it SO clearly I wrote it down! Here is what he says:

What is a strategy?
 
A strategy is about how you uses the resources at your disposal to achieve a desired result. It sets out:
 
* Where do we want to go?
* What is my starting point? 
* How far from the place we want to be are we?
* What needs to happen to get me from here to there?
* What policies will help that happen?
* What do we have to do and when?
* Who will do it and how will we resource it?

And by the way quite a few organisations I talked to don't have a strategy. In fact they don't even have a plan. They just have some stuff they think might a good idea to do in response to some other stuff that someone else thought was a good idea to do!

FYI Here is the Food Programme. Good on his response to the government's UK Food Strategy. Which is itself not a strategy, not a plan, but the aforementioned random stuff cobbled together!
https://lnkd.in/eT7wtAXj