Thought starter
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. 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 and they attended the offsite. 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 counts as a pass, and it is 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 different problems produce the same five pages. 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 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 retell what reached them: 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. No amount of communication will fix it.
Suppose that page is sharp, with a segment named and something ruled out, and the other five are not. Then 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. Nobody has to remember anything specific to repeat it. A choice is harder. Nobody can improvise "We are leaving the contract segment and putting the freed capital into the trade counters". Nor can anyone soften it unnoticed.
The same reason explains 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 asks the same question of the people who run the branches, the plants and the accounts.
Communication that earns buy-in runs two ways. Leaders hear and answer questions and objections. People can connect their own work to the choices.
In the best-run businesses, the organisation retells the strategy in its own words. It defends it without leadership in the room.
Most are not there. In most, the strategy has been communicated only 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. The retell test is the first practice in a Stages of Excellence strategy assessment. It is also the one most businesses would rather not run.