At some point during your strategy session, someone will say, “Don't want to be too prescriptive”.

This will be greeted with nodding.

It will feel like maturity. 

The room has collectively decided to trust the people doing the work rather than constraining them with unnecessary detail. 

It is not maturity. It is the moment the strategy session stops producing strategy and starts producing a very expensive permission slip for everyone to do whatever they were already planning to do.

Do not allow we don't want to be too prescriptive to end the conversation. 

Do not accept flexibility as a substitute for direction. 

Do not leave the room without naming what the strategy rules out — which opportunities will not be pursued, which customers will not be served, which projects will be stopped. 

Trade-offs are not a symptom of narrow thinking. 

They are the proof that thinking has occurred.

Every choice that does not rule something out has not chosen anything. If everything is still possible when you leave the room, nothing has been decided.

Go back in.