The Plan Is Not the Strategy

If your strategy has stopped being useful, you probably already know it. It shows up in small ways. Someone proposes a project with no connection to any of the stated pillars, and nobody objects, because there's nothing left in the document specific enough to object with.

Most organisations blame delivery when this happens. The strategy was sound, people say, the team just didn't execute it well enough. Sometimes that's accurate. More often the document itself was the problem. Richard Rumelt's work on this draws a useful line: a strategy that lists ambitions without naming what stands in the way of them isn't a weak strategy, it's not a strategy at all. It's a set of goals wearing the format of one.

A plan tells you what you want. A strategy tells you what you're willing to give up to get it, which budget line loses out, which project gets shelved this year, which team's priority drops down the list. Most planning workshops are built to avoid that second part. It's easy to get a room to agree on adding something new. It's much harder to get the same room to agree on cutting something they've already invested in.

You can test whether your own strategy does this. Pick any current initiative and ask what it displaced. If nobody in the room can answer that, the document probably lists intentions rather than choices.

The strategies that hold up in practice usually share one thing: the people delivering them were in the room when the trade-offs got made. That's what lets them apply the same reasoning later, to a situation the document never covered, and say no to something new without having to check back with anyone. A strategy written down and left in a folder doesn't do that. A strategy people actually understand does.

Getting there means having the conversation most workshops skip, the one where someone has to say what they'd give up. It works better when disagreement is allowed to sit in the room rather than getting tidied into a summary slide before anyone's argued about it properly.

Red Mountain runs these conversations directly with leadership teams, not as a document exercise but as a working session where trade-offs get named and agreed in the room.