Strategy begins where a choice has to be made

Some strategic plans get approved and, six months later, are still perfectly valid. That’s precisely the problem. Nobody has decided to abandon them, nobody has shown they were wrong, and when the leadership committee meets, everyone still agrees with the priorities that were set.

It’s just that some things haven’t happened.

So we talk about execution. We say day-to-day work has eaten the strategy, that the organization needs more focus, or that projects need closer follow-up. Could be. But there’s another, considerably less comfortable possibility: maybe the plan said what we wanted to achieve, but we never actually decided what we were willing to do to achieve it.

And that difference takes very little time to show up.

The following Tuesday

Picture a company deciding to develop a new business line. The decision makes sense: the market offers an opportunity, the current business still has room to run but not forever, and starting to build a second growth path seems like a good idea. The project gets approved, and the following Tuesday arrives.

One of the people who was supposed to dedicate a significant part of their time to the new business has to solve a problem with an important client. What do we do? Probably handle the client. Two weeks later, it happens again. This time it’s not exactly urgent, but there’s an important deal in progress and we need that same person. The new line can wait a few days.

Each decision, taken on its own, seems reasonable. The project hasn’t been cancelled, nor has it stopped being strategic. It’s just moving a bit slower. Until, a few months later, someone asks why we’re not progressing as expected, and we look at the person responsible for the project.

Maybe they should have pushed harder. But there’s a prior question: every time the current business and the future have competed, which one did we choose?

Because maybe the project doesn’t have an execution problem. Maybe it’s executing exactly the decisions we’ve been making.

The present doesn’t need anyone to defend it

The current business has a formidable advantage over any future strategy: it exists. When something important happens today, the consequence is visible. Someone is waiting for an answer, and we know what can happen if we don’t give it.

The future works differently. It can wait until tomorrow without, apparently, anything happening. And tomorrow too. That makes it extraordinarily easy to postpone, because every isolated decision has an impeccable explanation.

I’ve always said that today is managed and tomorrow is planned. But leading demands something more: aligning today’s execution and its P&L with tomorrow’s expectations and the company’s roadmap. Because if we let each one play its own game separately, the present almost always wins.

Nobody decides, for three months, to ignore a strategic priority. That would be too obvious. We do it Tuesday by Tuesday.

And I think that’s where a huge part of execution is actually decided. Not so much in an organization’s ability to turn a plan into projects, but in what it does once those projects start becoming inconvenient. Because if a strategy never forces a single decision about the present to change, it’s fairly hard to know what «priority» actually means.

The lead who can’t decide

There’s something especially frustrating about these projects. We appoint someone to lead them and expect them to make things happen, but a moment comes when they need something they don’t control.

Back to our new business line. Its lead needs that one key person two days a week. The head of the current business also needs her, and has excellent reasons not to give her up. The project lead can negotiate, but can’t resolve the conflict.

If nobody resolves it for them, the organization ends up finding a fairly predictable solution: that person will help the project when they can. And at that point the problem is no longer about follow-up. We’ve turned a business decision into a permanent negotiation between two people who, on top of it, are both doing their jobs correctly.

We can review the project every month and note that it’s slipped again. Nothing will change until we decide what should happen the next time the same conflict comes up.

A priority reveals itself when it competes

That’s why I struggle to take a list of ten strategic priorities too seriously. Not because a company can’t pursue many things at once, but because it can’t give all of them the same preference when they’re competing for something there isn’t enough of to go around.

As long as there’s no conflict, calling something a priority doesn’t cost much. The word gains meaning when choosing one thing forces another thing we also care about to be displaced.

And the future doesn’t always have to win. There will be moments when protecting the current business is exactly the right call. A strategy unable to coexist with reality isn’t much use either. What matters is knowing whether we’re choosing consciously, or simply letting whatever has the most pull on our attention today win by default.

The difference isn’t a small one. A strategic initiative running at half power doesn’t necessarily cost half as much. It can consume resources for far longer without ever reaching the point where it starts returning what was invested. And in the meantime, the capacity it occupies isn’t fully available for anything else either.

That’s where the lack of a decision starts to have a fairly concrete economic consequence.

A strategy also needs to be allowed to be wrong

Knowing whether an initiative really had priority matters for another reason: without that information, it’s hard to judge its outcome.

Say our new business line ultimately doesn’t work out. Maybe the hypothesis was wrong. Maybe the market wasn’t what we expected, and the smart move is to shut it down. That’s fine: a strategy is also there to help us discover that something that looked like a good idea wasn’t.

But it’s also possible we never really got to test it. If, over a year, it received attention only in fits and starts and systematically lost out whenever it competed with the current business, we know the project hasn’t worked. What we don’t know, exactly, is why.

And that difference matters. A company needs to be able to abandon a strategy when reality shows it was wrong. What’s dangerous is keeping initiatives alive for years that never receive enough capacity to prove they work, and don’t fail clearly enough to be shut down either.

They just sit there: always strategic, always delayed, always about to get the decisive push. That doesn’t preserve options. It consumes time.

What we decide when the plan becomes inconvenient

Over time, I’ve come to look at strategic plans a little differently. I care about what they say, of course, but to understand a company’s real strategy, I’d rather look at the moments when following through on it became uncomfortable.

Our new business line started out as a decision on a slide. It became strategy the day it needed a person who also mattered to the current business. That was the moment a decision had to be made.

Maybe the right answer was to leave her where she was. Maybe it was to move her to the new project. What matters isn’t which of the two options we chose, but that this decision said far more about our strategy than the slide where we’d written that the new line was a priority.

Plans can hold many things at once. Reality holds a lot less.

And maybe that’s why strategy really begins when doing one thing means not doing another.