The Action Agenda (Ambition-Filter Method)
Stop writing a 'strategy.' Filter your ambitions down to one important, addressable challenge and act.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
Rumelt's later, sharper reframing of how to actually produce a strategy. Rather than starting with mission, vision, and values, you accept your ambitions, then filter them to find the one challenge that is both important (close to an ambition) and addressable (you can actually make progress on it). You then name concrete action steps and call the result an 'action agenda,' not a strategy.
Origin
Richard Rumelt, presented as an evolution of the kernel in his 2022 book 'The Crux,' and refined further in this conversation. He says he would rewrite parts of The Crux today to lead with ambitions because clients get angry if not allowed to state them first.
Core principles
- 01Mission, vision, and values do not have to be in place before you can have a strategy
- 02Ambitions are legitimate but are not a strategy; everyone and every company has them
- 03The chosen challenge must sit at the overlap of important and achievable
- 04Action steps are things you will DO, not goals you will achieve
- 05Naming it an 'action agenda' cuts through the confusion created by thousands of strategy books
How to run it
- 1
List your ambitions
Let yourself and the team state every ambition without judgment. Rumelt lists his own at age 25: become a top professor, join corporate boards, drive a Morgan, climb great mountains, learn to fly.
Pro tip Allowing ambitions up front defuses the resistance that comes from people who insist on talking about them.
- 2
Sort by achievability
For each ambition ask what is keeping you from it, then set aside the ones you cannot make progress on now and keep the ones you can begin moving toward today.
Pro tip Ask 'which of these can I actually make progress on today?' to force the cut.
- 3
Choose one important, addressable challenge
Identify the challenge tied to a real ambition that you can genuinely address. You cannot take on all challenges, so this is a focusing choice.
Pro tip State the problem explicitly and ask 'what makes it hard?' before anything else.
Watch out A challenge that is important but not addressable will waste your focus; it must be both.
- 4
Write the action steps
Lay out the specific things you will do to go after that challenge. For a big company they extend two to three years; for a small company six months to a year.
Pro tip Frame every item as an action ('these are things we're going to do'), never as an outcome goal.
Watch out Do not relabel goals as actions; 'grow faster' is not an action step.
In the wild
A CEO tells Rumelt they want to open a business in Australia. He asks why they are even discussing it instead of just delegating it; when pressed, the CEO admits the real difficulty: 'we don't know anybody in Australia and they kick us out.' That buried difficulty is the actual challenge.
→ The felt difficulty had never been 'percolated into a strategy'; surfacing it via 'what makes it hard?' reveals the true crux to act on.
Common mistakes
Requiring mission/vision/values first
Rumelt says a whole industry sells you the belief that these must be in place before a strategy, and 'that's not true.'
Listing goals instead of actions
An action agenda specifies concrete moves; a list of desired outcomes is an ambition dressed up as strategy.
Is it for you?
Best for
A product manager or founder sitting down to write a team strategy who is drowning in strategy frameworks and wants a concrete starting move
Not ideal for
Board-level exercises whose explicit purpose is long-horizon vision-setting or cultural mission articulation
From the transcript
“don't call it a strategy call it an action agenda”
“which of your your Ambitions can you begin to make progress towards”
“it has to be an addressable Challenge”
“these are things we're going to do not goals we're going to achieve”
From the episode
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
Richard Rumelt