Strategy: corporate wankery, or a forgotten discipline for meaning-making? Depending on your level of workshop PTSD, probably both.
I spent years running strategy workshops. These days I'm more interested in building people's strategic capacity than making strategic documents. Regardless, I remain convinced of the importance of clear direction to channel effort.
Here are two things strategy can teach us about the moment we're in: the importance of process, and the danger of compressed time.
The importance of process
Strategy documents are a dime a dozen. For two decades, anyone with an internet connection can Google their way to something defensible. Send it to a designer and you've got yourself an attractive infographic to pin to the wall in the staffroom. Now, AI will do both. Bing, bang, boom.
The problem, of course, is those documents don't do anything. Unless people are involved and invested in a thinking process that carefully considers their long-term goals and negotiates their constraints, the chance of them 'sticking to' a strategy when things go pear-shaped is almost nil.
Strategy documents (at least the ones I sent) are often basic, ugly, and meaningless for anyone who wasn't involved. Brevity is the goal, penetration the measure. If I catch your executive team in an elevator six months later and they don't say roughly the same thing when I ask about collective focus, I know we've failed.
It was always about the workshops. Strategy is something you do, not something you have. In the room, people take time away from the grind to consider the bigger picture, connect with others, and negotiate possibility. People leave with a sense of purpose and the confidence to navigate what comes next. The thinking process - out loud, with others - was always the selling point of this work.
Now, panicked knowledge workers use AI to generate their emails, reports, business cases, and slides. A more sophisticated facade than the Googled strategies of yore, they soothe their fears and insecurities with the smoothing function of an LLM, convincing themselves they're just "polishing" their own thinking (rubbish.)
It all looks good until they need to go back to the work, answer questions about it, or rally a collective response to a tricky problem. Then, those outputs - so proudly presented after their one-button generation - are hollow. The words sounded plausible, but they lacked the meaning that would make them useful.
Whether you're writing a book, running a marathon, or drafting a strategy, you don't win by skipping the process. The knowledge, fitness, and direction are the point, not the obstacle. The means are the end. When we forget the value of process in favour of outputs we sacrifice outcomes. We entirely miss the point.
The danger of compressed time
Strategies are medium-term phenomena. What makes them so powerful - and so difficult to get right - is how they connect long-term aspirations with short-term operations.
Strategy is a practical, necessary process to allocate limited resources in an aligned fashion over time. Yes, we want to change the world. Yes, we're busy and broke. Holding both of those truths in tension, which principles or criteria do we need to apply to our decisions for the next 1-3 years to usefully channel our efforts?
By pushing our conversations out of the day-to-day, we create scaffolding for the scale and complexity of our organisations - all the different people, functions, and goals - to point in the same direction.
Strategy matters because few people naturally focus on the medium-term or consider second-order consequences, not without effort. Information and tasks enter the system at the operational level, and it takes time and intention to connect them to the bigger picture. Without strategic context, our perspective narrows to see only the challenges, constraints and rewards right in front of us. This is how we end up putting the fast, the cheap, and the now ahead of long-term progress.
The current information and technology environment - fragmented, siloed , non-human, automated - is designed for exactly that: fast, cheap, and now. It puts personalised, short-term optimisation ahead of long-term aspiration. It is no coincidence that this is also the organising principle of the world's most powerful companies and the products they sell.
This is bad for organisational strategy, but it's even worse for our relationships and personal lives.
When all we have are fast, urgent outputs, the future goes out the window - and meaning goes along with it. Beware the allure of speedy outputs.
