At Some Point, Strategy Becomes an Alibi
There is a particular kind of meeting where everybody gets smarter and nothing happens.The audience gets more nuanced and the cultural tension gets another layer. Someone asks whether we’ve considered the broader context..YES We have!!! It’s on slide forty-seven of this Odyssean deck! An hour later, the strategy has more depth and the business has exactly the same decisions to make. Everybody agrees the session was useful.Now this is the part I find interesting. We talk about overthinking as though it’s a malfunction. A clever person, trapped inside their own cleverness, who needs a better process and possibly a walk.
But let’s consider the incentives. Make a choice and you can be wrong. Recommend more analysis and you can be thorough. In a business where the first threatens your reputation and the second reinforces it, another workshop is a sensible career move.
The organisation gets the behaviour it rewards.
Then sends the strategist a podcast about getting unstuck. At some point, strategy becomes an alibi. A beautifully articulated explanation for why nobody has put anything at risk.A decision makes things awkward. Choosing an audience means accepting that some people matter less to this particular piece of work. Moving the budget means taking it away from something else. Killing an initiative means disappointing the person who brought it into the room in the first place. More thinking keeps those consequences politely out of frame.And we shouldn’t pretend the strategist is always an innocent hostage.
Being interesting is seductive.
The unexpected reference. The cultural observation. The sentence that makes someone lean back and say, “Fuck, that’s good.” I seriously love that moment. But the next question matters more.What does it change?The offer? The experience? The reason someone chooses us? What we spend money on next Monday? An insight can be fascinating and still leave everything untouched.There’s a particular comfort in keeping an idea theoretical. Inside the presentation, it can remain brilliant. Outside, people might ignore it. Misunderstand it. Buy the competitor because it was easier to find.
Reality has very little respect for the elegance of the rationale.That’s a difficult thing to accept when your identity is tied to being the person who sees what others miss. Putting the idea into the world gives other people permission to prove you wrong. So we refine it again.
Or we broaden it until every stakeholder can see themselves in it. Every audience remains important. Every initiative survives. Nobody has to surrender a budget. Eventually, the people delivering the work inherit all the choices we avoided. Usually with less time and more questions about why execution is taking so long. Of course, thinking takes time. Research matters. Some decisions are expensive or impossible to reverse. Shouting “just ship it” doesn’t make you commercially brave. It may simply mean someone else gets to clean up.But before the next round of analysis, we should be able to explain what we’re trying to learn.
What might the answer change? What evidence would make us reconsider? What can we test without betting the entire business? Those questions give the thinking somewhere to go.
Then give the choice an owner. Give it resources. Say what we’re leaving out. Agree when we’ll review what happened, including the possibility that our favourite assumption was wrong. The people commissioning the strategy have work to do here, too.
You can’t demand bold thinking and make universal agreement a condition of acting on it. You have to be willing to back a considered decision while its outcome is still uncertain. Otherwise, “be brave” is just something the most protected person in the room says to everyone else. The next time someone asks for more thinking, ask which decision it will help them make.Then ask who will own that decision.
Pay attention to which question makes the room uncomfortable.
