Thought starter
Strategy as a hessian sack of initiatives
Most businesses do not have a bad strategy. They have a list of goals or initiatives wearing a strategy's clothes. The document is titled Strategy, the offsite was called strategic, and nothing in it is a choice.
Grow revenue by a number, lift margin by a percentage, delight customers, be the employer of choice.
The trap is easy to fall into and hard to see from the inside. The goals and initiatives are usually sensible. Nobody argues with growing revenue. Every initiative currently underway can be called "on strategy". Grouping them together and calling the group a strategy is tempting.
Three tests
You can tell a group of goals or initiatives from a strategy in a few minutes with three questions. None of them needs a consultant.
What are you explicitly not doing? A strategy makes choices, and choices have a cost. A market not entered, a customer segment declined, a product line allowed to run down.
Perhaps nothing has been ruled out. Every market, product and initiative from the last decade is still alive and still funded. Then there are goals, and no choices.
The list of things the business will not do is the strategy's most honest page. Most strategy documents do not have one.
If your top five leaders each wrote the strategy down from memory, how similar would the five versions be? A strategy fits on a page and can be retold: where we compete, how we win, what we will do. Five leaders producing five different slogans are each describing their own department's goals or initiatives. The strategy document gave them nothing else to work with.
When the strategy changed, did the budget change with it? This test is the one that separates a real strategy from a well-written one. Suppose the strategy was refreshed last year, and the budget is still last year's plus inflation. Then the strategy has not met the business yet. Money and people following the choices is the single most observable difference between businesses that execute and businesses that plan.
Why it happens
Goals are safe. A goal offends no one and asks no one to give anything up. People who disagree about everything else can agree it in a single meeting.
Choices cost. A choice to concentrate on one segment is a choice to under-serve another. The executive who runs the other is likely in the room.
So the planning process, designed to produce consensus, quietly removes the choices. Options are developed, softened, merged and then all approved. Each theme gets a slide. Each function gets an initiative. The result is coherent in the sense that nothing in it contradicts anything else, because nothing in it commits to anything.
A second cause is less comfortable: goals do not require a diagnosis. A strategy has to start by naming the two or three issues that determine the business's future. The wording has to survive a sceptic reading it aloud. A diagnosis like that is uncomfortable to write and more uncomfortable to circulate. Opening with ambition skips it entirely.
What it costs
The cost of goals-as-strategy is invisible. It arrives slowly, as drift.
Initiatives multiply and do not add up. There are dozens, and several contradict each other. None is clearly strategic.
The budget follows last year because nothing in the strategy tells it to do otherwise. The profitable core quietly subsidises the hobby portfolio, since no one has decided the hobbies should stop. And five years later the business is a slower, thinner version of the one that wrote the goals, having hit some of them.
The momentum case shows the cost in advance. It projects where the current course lands in five years if nothing changes. A business run on goals usually finds the momentum case and the goals pointing in different directions. Nothing in between them could be called a plan to close the gap. That gap is what the strategy was supposed to be.
What to do instead
The fix is a different order of operations.
Write the diagnosis first, before any aspiration. State plainly the two or three things that determine the future.
Then develop real options, at least two of which you would be sorry to reject. Reject some. Turn each remaining aspiration into a choice. Name what you will do, where, and what you are explicitly not doing.
Then reopen the budget against the choices. Show, line by line, the money and people that moved.
That takes weeks of work, and the discipline matters more than the deck. The document at the end may still contain a revenue number and a percentage. The difference is that they will sit underneath a set of choices, and stop standing in for them.