Need a Good Strategy? Get Emotional!

We often pretend that strategy is cold, hard, and based solely on data. But it’s not. And we make better decisions when we embrace that.

- HAMZA MUDASSIR

You rarely hear the words "emotion" and "strategy" in the same breath.

There's a reason for that: Emotions, especially in popular culture, are believed to be messy and subjective. Strategic planning, on the other hand, is driven by cold logic. It's why we have data and objective analysis, right? It's why strategy consulting has become a multibillion-dollar market, run by disassociated wonks trained in clinical processes.

However, this is a simplistic and naïve way of thinking. Breakthrough research from neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, has shown that emotions are essentially forecasts that your brain produces as "shortcuts" based on your past experiences. That includes those in business. According to Barrett, emotions are one of the brain's ways of making sense of a world that would otherwise overwhelm it. By creating these shortcuts, we don't have to process information as if it's new every time-which means we save on reaction time and increase our ability to survive.

So what does this have to do with business strategy? Well, strategy formulation-just like emotion-is also based on a set of forecasts. You are doing what you believe to be best for your company, based on whatever you've experienced before. This means that whenever you embark on a strategy development process, you are in effect embarking on an emotional journey as much as an intellectual one.