Your company's next strategy day is likely to fail. Not because you lack vision or capability, but because the format itself is fundamentally flawed as a way of creating strategy.
In the best case it can be a great day, full of energy and enthusiasm, with ideas zinging and a sense of coming together. But all too often that energy disappates once people get back to their desks, and initiatives stall when they clash with day-to-day priorities. Typically, by March, we're back to business as usual.
Let's explore why and look for a better approach.
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"Large-scale problems do not require large scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large scale framework." — David Fleming
Strategy off-sites/away-days are an attempt to create focused time away from the day-to-day that builds alignment, breaks through established thinking, and strengthen team relationships. However, these good intentions don't always translate into effective outcomes.
If you want to get fit which approach is more effective? 45 minutes at the gym, twice per week? Or 6 hours once per month? Focus and intensity have their place but consider whether a question that cannot be answered at 9am will be answerable by 5pm the same day.
We often see strategy days as the answer to our current strategy not working well enough. Ironically that strategy is likely the product of a previous strategy day.
"If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking." — Benjamin Franklin
As the saying goes, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." The possibilities and good intent we have about a strategy day can be overwhelmed by persistent cultural misalignments that can't be resolved in a single session.
Practical Experience: If the commercial teams and product teams don't see eye-to-eye about priorities before the strategy day it's very unlikely they will find meaningful alignment in the day. It's more likely that there will be frustrating, circular conversation over familiar arguments, and withdrawl.
"The smartest person in the room is the room." — David Weinberger
Strategy days typically exclude vital perspectives, particularly from those lower in the organizational hierarchy who often have the most direct experience with customers and products. Even when junior staff are present, they may feel unable to contribute meaningfully if strategy is seen as the purview of senior leadership.
Practical Experience: Very few people are willing to show up their CEO or director in a public forum. Very few people are willing to be the bearer of bad news. But you need them to do these things. It doesn't happen by accident.
"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." — Sun Tzu
Few people have a clear understanding of what a strategy should look like or how to create one. Strategy days often produce aspirational statements and bullet points rather than actionable frameworks for decision-making. The hard work of turning these into a coherent strategy is left as an "exercise for later" - one that rarely gets completed effectively.
Practical Experience: The outcome of a strategy day is often, at best, some kind of Google Doc, spreadsheet, Trello board, or photographs of a wall of Post-It's. It may feel good to look at the stuff, but it will not help.
"You cannot be everything to everyone. If you decide to go north, you cannot go south at the same time." — Jeroen de Flander
At the heart of good strategy lies strict prioritization. A strategy must clearly state that A is more important than B, that effort should go to X rather than Y. However, most strategies avoid these hard choices, instead presenting a list of compatible-sounding but practically conflicting goals.
Practical Experience: A strategy of "innovating" while remaining "cost-conscious" sounds reasonable but is fundamentally at odds with reality. Reality does not bend, we do. Faced with contradictions managers and staff ignore the strategy and go back to business as usual.
“Strategy is about shortening your odds; there’s nothing perfect about it." — Roger Martin
Effective strategy is not strategy documents or strategy events but the practice of being strategic: repeatedly teasing out invalid or limiting assumptions, closing gaps in our alignment, and re-prioritising based on what we have learned. Colonel John Boyd, in describing his OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) Loop methodology, said it was "a continuous cycle of iteration and reorientation where speed of execution and ability to adapt were more important than perfection." In this context strategy events are a summation of the work, not the work itself.
Therefore you must prioritize regular strategic thinking and defend it from tactical priorities.
While it's easier to protect one 8-hour meeting a year than a weekly 1-hour session that's what it takes to make strategy an ongoing practice. Strategy days then become what they are best at, a checkpoint, a summation, and an opportunities to strengthen relationships and multiply value across the business.
"To achieve greatness, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time." — Leonard Bernstein
Strategic success requires thorough preparation.
That means that we need access to relevant data and questions to guide our analysis. We need a map of the opportunities and risks we are facing supported by evidence and examples. We need a sense of what is working and what is not. We need access to the history of past decision making and its results.
And we need a place to share and discuss these issues that acts as a single source of truth for our strategic thinking and a repository of past discussions and decisions (a 'corporate memory').
These discussions must happen continuously, with strategy days serving as milestones for decisions and alignment.
"Too many problem-solving sessions become battlegrounds where decisions are made based on power rather than intelligence." — Margaret J. Wheatley
Front-line staff often know how your business really works and what needs to change. Their engagement is crucial for strategic success. If they seem disengaged, it's often because they feel unheard or believe their input won't matter.
Create psychological safety by explicitly valuing dissent and protecting those who speak up. As military officers do when boxing, everyone should step into strategy discussions "rankless". Speaking up is risky, you must actively make it safer.
Provide multiple channels for input - from group discussions to anonymous feedback to one-on-one conversations. While vocal participants can dominate discussions, our ongoing strategic practice means we're not dependent on single-session dynamics.
"Strategy is a framework for decision making." — Stephen Bungay
Every employee makes dozens of decisions daily - from how to handle customer requests to which features to prioritize. Each choice either advances your strategy or undermines it. Research shows that organizations where employees understand the strategy outperform those where it remains confined to leadership.
Yet many businesses treat strategy as sensitive information, sharing only vague directives. This creates two problems: frontline staff make uninformed decisions, and the strategic feedback that teaches you that the strategy has a problem never arrives.
If you want to avoid a continuation of 'business as usual' you should prefer to share the strategy widely so that people make decisions that advance the strategy. The other practices in this monograph will help to build trust and develop 'strategic conversations' that will give you early and invaluable feedback when things go wrong or against our expectations.
"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no-one was listening, everything must be said again." — Andre Gide
Forcing people to "extract" a strategy from a documents, spreadsheets, or reports is prone to failure. It's easier to ignore a confusing strategy and carry on business as usual.
Therefore pick a template for presenting strategy and use it consistently. Ensure everyone can clearly pick up the most salient points that they must use in their decision-making.
The most important element is clear prioritisation: Are we innovating? Or are cost-cutting? If we prioritise both we prioritise neither and the results will be a confused mess.
AgendaScope publishes a free, proven, strategy template that you can use.
"Once you have power, you are inevitably surrounded by people who have their own agendas and will tell you whatever advances them." — Margaret Heffernan
Every department has their own perspective and different priorities and incentives. This often leads to conflict but, by adopting the right practices, we increase the chance of productive disagreement.
A common example is the divide between commercial and product teams. Commercial teams understand market value but often have unhelpful assumptions about the effort required to deliver them while product teams understand effort but have unhelpful assumptions about impact. To unlock our potential we must harness that breadth of perspective while closing the gaps in alignment.
Regular cross-team strategy sessions build trust and mutual understanding. Teams develop shared success metrics and learn to balance competing priorities, resulting in strategies that deliver better outcomes.
An effective strategy is not merely a statement of our ambitions but the decision-making framework everyone uses to ensure that their individual choices advance the organization's goals.
The key is not to abandon strategy days but to reframe them as checkpoints. This approach acknowledges that strategy, like any complex organizational capability, requires continuous attention, adaptation, and refinement, not periodic bursts of activity.
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