The strategy review has arrived. Twelve months ago, the leadership team locked themselves in a hotel forty minutes outside the city — far enough to feel strategic, close enough to get back — and produced a strategic direction. It was captured in a document, cascaded through four layers of management, entered into the performance system, and added to the intranet page that nobody visits.
The strategy was:
"Drive sustainable growth by leveraging our core strengths to deliver exceptional value across all customer segments."
Read that again.
Slowly.
Notice that it contains no information.
Notice that it could describe your company, your competitor, or a moderately ambitious sandwich shop.
Notice that the person who wrote it was almost certainly paid more than you.
As you might have guessed, the review is not going well. Three business units have spent the year working in three different directions. A fourth has been working in the right direction, which would be encouraging, except that when asked why, they cite a hunch. The numbers are, as the CFO puts it, mixed — the word organisations use when they mean bad but need to retain the people responsible for it.
The root cause is identified. It is — and try to contain your surprise — insufficiently aligned strategically.
That’s a great plan, Walter!
Nobody mentions that a document this magnificently vague could not, even in theory, produce alignment, because alignment requires that words mean specific things, and these words have been carefully engineered to mean nothing specific at all.
Nobody mentions this because the people who would mention it are the people who wrote it, and this is not that kind of meeting.
There will be a new strategy by January.
It will be more ambitious.
The hotel has already been booked.
The Post-it notes have been ordered.
Someone has suggested bringing in an external facilitator this time, which tells you everything you need to know about how much confidence the organisation has in its own ability to think.
And it will fail for the same reason, because nobody has noticed the actual lesson: a strategy that fits every direction chooses none of them.
The vagueness was not a flaw in the strategy.
The vagueness was the strategy — carefully built so that no one could ever be wrong, which is the same as no one ever deciding anything.
We keep throwing time and money at strategies built to be unfalsifiable, and they will keep failing until we accept the one thing strategy actually is: a choice.
