A CEO faces a decision about whether to make an investment in a new product line that requires significant capital. Does he need any competitive intelligence?

A General Manager must decide the complete range of activities to implement to enter a new market segment. Does she need competitive intelligence?

The Marketing vice president struggles to clarify the winning proposition for the key brand of the company. Does his organization need competitive intelligence?

It is easy to answer “yes” to these scenarios. Each decision-maker faces choices that affect their organizations and, ultimately, influence their chances for success. However, the choices are rarely simple. For example, favoring one approach means that another must be deemphasized leading to disruptions in the organizational roles and responsibilities. Changes often imply new investments, processes and skills. These things cost precious money, time and energy that must be deducted from a finite “bank” within the company. Moreover, other stakeholders assert their importance along vectors independent of competition. For instance, owners, regulatory agencies, communities and others regularly inject their priorities into the mix considered by senior managers.

Since competitive intelligence is only one of the voices in the mix, how can it be effective (and not be unwisely drowned out)?

Here are three ideas to consider.

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When a medical professional examines someone in the emergency room, he or she looks for signs of physical distress. How is the patient breathing? What about their skin color? Are their eyes dilated? Where are the visible signs of trauma? All of this (and more) is necessary to know before treating the person. After all, applying the wrong treatment can be more harmful than ignoring the physical distress.

Companies experience distress.

You do not have to look far to see signs of that distress. Talk with people that have survived a series of layoffs and reorganizations. Ask them about the constant worry of losing their jobs while coping with a series of changed assignments. Question them about the difficulty of trying to do ordinary business when management has severely reduced their flexibility to spend money or take risks. Watch how people talk about the future and their hopes. When you do these things, you begin to see severe distress.

Strategy and competitive intelligence organizations are suffering.

Within companies today, the current priority for many is simple survival. There is no shame, of course, with this objective. It does force hard decisions. One decision is to focus maniacally on preserving cash. That means two things – reduce expenses to the barebones and pursue short-term sales. Consequently, other things suffer. For example, many curtail or deemphasize strategy and competitive intelligence. This produces a specific kind of distress.

Here are five signs of business strategy or competitive intelligence distress.

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When you get two people together that speak no common languages, communication is difficult. Sometimes, recognition of the miscommunication happens quickly. One person tries (in their own language) to ask if the other person understands what they are saying. In the opposite direction, the same question (in the second person’s language) follows sincerely puzzled looks from both people.

What happens next?

You probably have been in these situations when seemingly the only resort is to use sign language. Our hands start waving and fingers start pointing. Occasionally, accompanying the gestures, we speak slower and louder as if that makes the language clearer. Through the pantomime, amazingly, we often get enough information to take our next step. Inefficient and fraught with negative possibilities, nevertheless it sometimes works.

How valuable would a translator be at those times?

Pretty valuable, because their expert services would significantly reduce the risk of misunderstanding. Both parties would walk away more confident that they have been understood. Whatever the next steps, they would not be left hanging with a question of whether or not they had made the best choice based on the clearest information (something that a good translation could have easily provided).

Business communications and its issues are not much different.

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It probably wasn’t until I spent time in Malindi, Kenya, that I got a visceral sense of what it meant to be in the minority. My skin was far lighter, my hair was different and my clothes seemed out of place. I was a “mzungu” (white person). The people were quite kind yet I knew that most of the social adaptations would have to come from me. For a relatively brief time I felt what minorities must feel all the time when they live permanently with people different from themselves.

What does skin color and social background have to do with strategic or tactical thinking?

Only the recognition that the world is dominated by tactical thinking and a strategist will always be in the minority. “Minority thinking” means that most of the time the strategists must adapt to the tacticians rather than the inverse. It does not mean however that strategists are less valuable or needed. And it does not mean that strategy is unimportant. But a strategist that only masters strategic thinking without understanding how to act tactically will most likely fail (or at best succeed sporadically).

The critical implication is that a strategist has a particular requirement to speak two languages. First, there is the native language of strategy. Second, there is the foreign language of the majority that is primarily tactical.

Say something strategic to most tactical people and it would be like a Kenyan saying something in Swahili to me. Aside from “hakuna matata” (no worries) and a few other phrases, I would be lost. Similarly, when strategy encounters a tactical mindset, the strategist faces the likely outcome that they will be misunderstood unless they follow some simple rules.

Here are 5 powerful rules that can help guide a strategist’s behavior and translate their message.

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