Challenges are raised, experience shared, quality of the slides duly praised. The plan is signed off subject to some more evidence being brought back on a few questions. After the obligatory Board Dinner, the day-to-day resumes with everyone a little more confident that the business is on the right path.
The motions of a strategy process have been followed. But none of the muscles that are truly needed to build strategic resilience in today's environment have been exercised.
Also in this issue
Ask every member of your executive team to give you one sentence describing your overarching strategy. If the answers differ, you don't have an alignment problem. You have a strategy problem.
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Strategy today is suffocating in its own noise. Decisions stall. Confidence thins. Everything feels urgent. And yet — so little actual progress. The missing ingredient isn't capability or intelligence. It's the quiet space where real strategic thinking begins. And reclaiming it is a serious act of leadership.
Read →Tool of the month
How strong are your board's strategy muscles? The Strategic Play diagnostic measures four capabilities - Growth, Wayfaring, Elevation and Flow - and shows where your natural strengths lie and which muscles you are exercising regularly.
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Further reading
Questions for the boardroom
A good strategy conversation doesn't start with a slide deck but with the questions the boardroom is willing to ask. The following five questions can help your Board and ExCo reflect on the current strategy process and start to exercise new strategic muscles.
How do our individual strategy muscle profiles compare and where are the gaps when we put them all together?
What are we each doing to master AI -- not formal training, not business investment decisions, but how we're building our own capability through personal experimentation? Who amongst us can code a website or build an agent?
If nothing were off the table, what's the boldest move our business could make right now? What's stopping us?
What trends have we spent most time analysing in the last quarter -- and does that cover a wide range of long-term forces across geopolitical shifts, societal and demographic change, climate, and technology?
Which of our plans feels most likely to under-deliver in the current context? Are we able to have a completely open, non-defensive debate about whether we continue on the current track?
Field Notes
In preparing for a board strategy offsite last year, we sat with an ExCo whose strategy had been written at significant cost by a top-tier firm. It was thematically sound but generic enough to have served almost any comparable business at almost any point in the last fifteen years. A year on, there was no appetite to revisit it, which was reasonable. But there was also an absence of appetite to meaningfully challenge the delivery plans built behind it, despite a market landscape that had shifted considerably.
The board session was being designed to create the impression of strategic engagement without inviting any of its consequences. Market changes were to be presented in sufficient volume and complexity to explain away performance, not to provoke deeper reflection on it. A session on real scenario planning and pre-mortems was considered but dropped. The defensiveness in the room was palpable.
It was a clear illustration of what the absence of Strategic Play looks like. Not incompetence — these were smart, experienced people. Just muscles that hadn't been exercised in a long time, so getting started felt simply too uncomfortable.
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