Ask ten people in the same business to explain the strategy.
Most businesses will get ten different answers.

Most leaders treat this as a communication problem.
Run an all hands, pay a load of money to plaster the company values on a wall in the office. Berate staff for not reading the 200 page strategy deck.

The problem isn’t normally communication though.

The strategy is.

Bullshit Strategy

Alex Smith, who spent years inside some of the world’s largest companies watching strategy get made and ignored, puts it plainly: ‘most strategy is bullshit.’

Ambitious words, full of frameworks and priorities and strategic pillars, but ultimately unable to answer the one question that makes strategy real.

What should I do?

A real strategy tells people what to do.
More importantly, it tells them what not to do.

At every level of the business, in decisions the leadership team will never be in the room for, it should be possible to ask whether a choice is consistent with the direction, and get a clear answer.

If the strategy can’t do that, it’s bullshit.

The Test

Pick any real decision your business is facing.

A pricing call.
Whether to pursue a particular customer segment.
How to respond to a competitor moving into your space.

Now try to answer it using only your strategy.

If the strategy doesn’t help.
If the answer would be the same regardless of what it says.
It’s not a strategy.
It’s just a record of what leadership agreed to agree on.

The businesses that build genuine differentiation tend to have strategies that pass this test.
Every person who touches the product, the brand, the customer conversation, understands well enough what they’re trying to achieve and what they’re willing to sacrifice to get there.
Choices compound in the same direction.

Over time, that compounding is what drives growth and value.

Without it, decisions get made in isolation.
Each reasonable. Each defensible.
Together, they pull in different directions, and the business ends up looking like every other business trying to keep its options open.

Why Businesses Avoid Real Strategy

Writing a clear strategy is uncomfortable.
Specificity requires exclusion.
Saying which customers you’re for means accepting you’re not for others.
Saying what you won’t do will cause division.

So strategies get softened.
Objectives broaden until they could apply to any business in any category.
Priorities multiply until prioritisation has effectively been abandoned.
The document gets longer, more thorough, harder to argue with, and less and less useful as a guide to making actual decisions.

xThe problem usually gets diagnosed as a hiring problem, or a culture problem, or a go-to-market problem.
Those things may need attention.
But the root cause is that nobody was ever clear enough about the direction for the organisation to move coherently in it.

What Legible Strategy Actually Requires

It requires leaders to make real choices and write them down.
The question to answer isn’t what the business hopes to become.
It’s what it will actually do, and what it won’t.
Specific enough that a new hire in their second week could read it and make a real decision.

If the thinking is clear, the writing will be.
If the writing is vague, the thinking likely hasn’t been done.
The specificity is the point.

A strategy that works for everyone works for no one.
A proposition that offends nobody says nothing.

The discomfort of committing to a direction that might turn out to be wrong is exactly where most strategy work stops short.
It’s also exactly where the value creation begins.

There’s one more thing that kills legible strategy before it gets started

Incentives that point in the opposite direction.

You can write the clearest strategy document in the world, but if the commission structure, the KPIs, and the performance reviews all reward different behaviour, people will follow the incentives.
They always do.

A strategy that points left while the bonus structure points right will simply never be succesful.

Where to Start

If your strategy currently lives in a deck that only the leadership team has read, start with the test.

Ask three people at different levels of the business what the company is doing, and what it has decided not to do.

Ask them how they’d approach a decision the strategy hasn’t explicitly covered.

Listen carefully.

The gap between what you intended and what landed is the gap that’s blocking value creation and growth.

Don’t just recommunicate your old strstegy.

Rebuild it.

Sit with real choices long enough to actually make them.

Build a strategy that your people can act on.

And if all else fails.

Just stick your values up on the wall.