"If my grandmother had wheels..."

The problem of reality, and its application to strategy-making

It’s really funny. It’s a British morning show, and the hosts have this Italian chef on the program. He’s making pasta.

As she’s tasting the pasta, the morning show host turns and tells the Italian chef that with a few changes and tweaks to the recipe it would be a completely different pasta dish (specifically, a British, rather than an Italian dish).

Visibly disturbed, the Italian chef looks up and says, “If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.” (Here’s a 41 second clip if you’d like to watch.)

If only we snapped our fingers and changed everything about this reality, then we would get something wonderful.

If only. If only we had a super-weapon. If only we owned this market-demographic. If only we could get hyper-precise polling. If only we had access to a coveted media outlet. If only people knew just how good our product is.

“If only.” It’s the dark-side of the visualization it takes for strategy to be made.

Of course we need to envision some currently-beyond-sight future to craft a strategy to get to that promised land. We need to see beyond the fog, which takes some imagination to make it possible.

But that same gift turns to rot when we conjure up imaginary circumstances that we wished were in existence.

The most common is tools, as above, in the classic opening line, “if only.” Those two words have sunk a thousand ventures. The wishful wish for some magic tool that would make the journey so much easier, so much better. It pops up all the time. Even in professional militaries, multi-star commands—in 2021, I wrote about “why strategies suck,” and pointed out that I had reviewed a strategy that relied upon a “mythical savior widget.”

The other great “if only” is circumstance. The desire for another reality. The hope that reality might simply change itself, to make the world more pleasing or nice or kind than it currently is. If only we could have a nicer path to the the end we seek.

This is fundamentally what undoes “if only” thinking. While we need to rely on vision about the future course of events—which does involve some beyond-reason voodoo—we must never be fully focused on the reality at hand. Where we are is where we are, and no amount of “if only” will get us elsewhere. The quicker we abolish those thoughts, the quicker we’ll get to reality, which is the start point for strategy-making (and knock-down Italian dishes).