Eight typical points where a strategy document loses touch with the work, and what changes if you close even three of them.
A strategy rarely fails at the point of choice. It fails at the seam between the document and the calendar: the decision is made, but nobody knows whose task it now is, or by when.
We took that gap apart. The most common form: the document has a target state but no description of the first step. The second: the step is described but has no owner, only a department. The third: there is an owner, but no authority to stop current work in favour of the new.
A separate case is a strategy written only as a list of intentions. Enter new segments, improve efficiency, strengthen the brand. Such a text cannot be contradicted, which means it cannot be tested either. A working formulation always says what the company is giving up.
The test is simple: if you cannot turn the document into a list of tasks with names and dates, it is not yet a strategy — only an intention to write one.
- The most common cause of a stall is the first step having no owner
- A formulation stated as a trade-off works better than one stated as an intention
- A document without dates falls out of use within about a quarter