A fundamental truth of today’s market is that every strategy—customer acquisition, product, marketing, brand, launch, or pricing—has to be sharp enough to compete in an environment that no longer tolerates unsophisticated approaches.

But smart doesn’t have to mean complicated. It also doesn’t have to mean trendy. Your strategy can be anti-complication, anti-feature, or even anti-trend. What it can’t be, though, is unconsidered.

With that in mind, here are five traits that define effective strategy.

Honesty

There’s a balance here that needs to be attempted—a balance between reaching past what you know is capable and stopping short of what you’re clearly incapable of achieving. It seems simple, but this discernment is hard to come by. Leaders are visionary by nature, which means they can be disconnected from reality. On the other hand, strategists are logical, which means they can be disconnected from blue-sky thinking.

The key is to find that middle place where both the leader and the strategist feel slightly uncomfortable. That’s the sweet spot where effective strategy really takes shape.  

Patience

Sure, time is of the essence. It’s never not of the essence. Everything needs to be done now, or even yesterday. But the reality is that effective strategy, which is the only kind of strategy that matters, takes a certain amount of time to create. It’s often not fast. Even when the initial insight comes quickly, validation takes time—both internal alignment and objective outside perspectives. Building in that time is an investment, not a delay.

Investment

Effective strategy demands resources—money, time, or both. Pretending otherwise is dangerous. The level of investment depends on the scope of ambition, but assuming you can achieve meaningful change without allocating real resources is a recipe for failure.  

Rigor

It’s not possible to pull all the assumptions out of a strategy—I’m a firm believer that intuition and experience play a role in effective strategy as well—but it is possible to pull most of them out.  Effective strategies rely on data and evidence, even if a portion of that data is anecdotal. The first phase of every strategic development process should be research, and that research should guide your overall strategic direction.  However, you also need to be committed to validating your strategy along the way, being fearless about changing course when the evidence is clear. 

Discipline

I’m borrowing a McKinsey framework here because it’s relevant and useful.  As the authors write in Mastering the building blocks of strategy, “Companies do better when they ground all their strategy-development efforts and processes in an understanding of the building blocks of strategy. These straightforward modes of activity track the progression of a strategy from its roots as an idea through its emergence as an operational reality.”

The five building blocks of strategy—diagnose, forecast, search, choose, and commit—are bookended by “frame” and “evolve,” which are steps designed to ground you at the beginning of your efforts and push you towards growth and change at the end. 

Effective strategy doesn’t need to be elusive. It also doesn’t need to be difficult. Understanding what effective strategies have in common, and using the five building blocks of strategy are what smart brands do to get ahead.