Five leaders, five answers

Ask five leaders what the strategy is. If you get five different answers, the business does not yet have a strategy problem. It has a problem finding out whether it has one.

The retell test is the oldest trick in strategy review, and it works because it is hard to fake. Ask the five most senior people in the business, separately and without warning, to write the strategy down from memory. Three lines: where we compete, how we win, what we will do. Then put the five pages side by side.

Nobody fails this test on purpose. The leaders are capable, they attended the offsite, and they can all produce something. The question is whether the five somethings are the same thing.

What the spread looks like

At one end, the five pages describe the same choices in different words. That is a pass, and rarer than you would think.

In the middle, the pages agree on the aspiration and disagree on everything underneath it. All five say "growth" or "the customer". Two name a segment; three name different ones. One lists the initiatives in their own department. Nobody has written what the business will not do.

At the far end, five answers. Partner of choice. Customer-centric growth. Operational excellence. Each is true of every business in the industry and describes none of them.

Two failures that look the same

The test has one weakness: two very different problems produce the same five pages, and the fix for one is useless for the other.

The first failure is that there is nothing to retell. The strategy is a list of goals with no choices attached. Grow revenue, improve margins, delight customers. Leaders cannot retell what was never decided, so each fills the gap with the version that suits their own function. The spread is not a communication problem. It is the strategy, accurately reported.

The second failure is that there is something to retell and it was never told. The choices exist. They are in a document, or in the chief executive's head, and they are specific. But the strategy was announced once, by email, and never mentioned again. The top team half knows it; two levels down it is rumour. The leaders are retelling what reached them, which was the slogan on the first slide.

To tell the two apart, add a sixth page. Ask the chief executive to write the same three lines. If that page is also a slogan, it is the first failure, and no amount of communication will fix it. If that page is sharp, with a segment named and something ruled out, and the other five are not, it is the second failure. The strategy exists and has not left the room.

Why slogans win the retelling

A slogan survives because it commits to nothing, so nobody has to remember anything specific to repeat it. A choice is harder. "We are leaving the contract segment and putting the freed capital into the trade counters" cannot be improvised, and it cannot be softened without someone noticing.

That is also why choices, once told, are remembered better than slogans. People retell what surprised them, what cost them something, or what changed their week. A strategy nobody can retell is usually one that never asked anything of them.

Two levels down

The senior test is the easy one. The harder version is the same question asked of the people who run the branches, the plants and the accounts. Communication that earns buy-in runs two ways: questions and objections are heard and answered, and people can connect their own work to the choices. The best-run businesses get to a point where the organisation retells the strategy in its own words and defends it without leadership in the room.

Most are not there, and the honest description is that the strategy has been communicated in the sense that it was sent.

What to do with the result

If it is the first failure, go back to the page. Write the diagnosis, make the choices, and name what the business will stop. A strategy review starts there, and nothing later in it matters until this is done.

If it is the second failure, the strategy is fine and the job is cheaper. Tell it in person, in plain language, and let people argue with it. Connect each function's work to the choices. Then run the test again in three months, and go two levels down when you do.

Either way, the test takes a week and costs nothing. It is the first practice in a stages-of-excellence strategy assessment, and it is the one most businesses would rather not run.

Run the strategy check · What a strategy review should cover · The stages of excellence in strategy