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COUNTY COMMENT %u2022 March 2025 9STRATEGY AND COMMUNICATIONBy Jay Hall, KAC Deputy Director & General CounselLast month we started exploring how to diagnose problems and, perhaps more importantly, how to address the problems once we have diagnosed them. As a reminder, the five basic types of problems are 1) Goal problems, 2) Strategic problems, 3) Communications problems, 4) Resource problems, and 5) Execution problems.To be clear, every problem manifests itself as an execution problem %u2013 it always looks like someone simply did not do something right, which led to the ultimate failure of whatever it was we were trying to do in the first place. That usually isn%u2019t the case, though. Typically, failure happens long before we try to do the thing we want to do. As we explored last month, goal problems trip us up because we do not actually know what we are trying to do, or even worse, there is no agreement on what it is we are trying to do. Either scenario leads to failure.But let%u2019s say we have a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timebound) goal. That is only the first step. We still have to actually DO the thing we want to do and that requires strategy. We have to know how we are going to achieve what we want. Imagine we are a football team. The ultimate goal is to win the game. That requires a lot of things, but a lot of the success or failure of the team will come down to calling the right plays in the right situations and making sure the players on the field know what to do on those plays.Calling the plays from the sidelines is the strategy part of things. Getting that message conveyed from the coach on the sidelines to the players on the field is the communication part. We cannot succeed if we do not do both well.Let%u2019s say we call the wrong play. Even if we execute well, calling the wrong play for the situation (a strategic failure) will still lead to overall failure. When we are looking at problems within our community, we have to ask the same questions a football coach would ask %u2013 was this the right play for this situation? Strategic mistakes doom us before we even start. Being situationally wrong makes us ultimately wrong. We have to have a sound strategy in order to succeed.Of course, that means we actually have to have a strategy to begin with. When I teach trial skills to law students, I often remind them that hope is not a plan. That means that we have to have an actual plan of how we will achieve the ultimate thing before we actually achieve the ultimate thing. Simply hoping everything will work out is a recipe for everything not working out. continued