Many successful organizations lack a clear and well-communicated strategy, relying instead on instinct and leadership team familiarity. This 'strategy deficit' becomes apparent during times of change and uncertainty, hindering effective decision-making and consistent action across the organization. This article explores the myths that perpetuate this deficit, offering insights on how to convince leadership of the value of strategy and how to overcome common pitfalls.
“We don’t have a strategy,” boasted a tech company CEO in our first conversation. He was justifiably proud of what he and his team had built. “We’ve done well without one, and we’re doing fine now. Strategy feels like a good way to take our eye off the ball.
” To him, strategy was a slow, political exercise that invited too much debate, increased bureaucracy, and distracted the organization from what made it successful. He’s not alone in this view. As a strategic advisor to CEOs and C-suite executives for 30 years in 30 countries, I hear it from founders who have scaled their businesses through entrepreneurial spirit and instinct, from business unit leaders who deliver their numbers, and from functional heads who keep things moving through relationships and know-how. This skepticism also shows up during uncertain periods, when attention focuses on immediate delivery and anything labelled “strategy” comes across as a detour from making progress. Research on executive confidence helps explain why this “we’re fine” story persists for so long. CEO overconfidence is often associated with bold moves and strong performance. But it can also lead to misjudgments and make it harder to change course, as leaders remain committed to familiar trajectories even as the context changes. Whether the driver is growth or uncertainty, the leadership challenge is the same: More good decisions need to be made, faster, and by people well beyond the senior team. Senior leaders’ judgment still matters—it just needs to be clear enough for others to learn from and apply so that the organization can act consistently without escalating everything to the top. If you’re a chief of staff, head of strategy, or functional or business unit leader looking to convince a reluctant CEO or other C-suite leader of the merits of adopting a strategic approach, you need to position it as an advantage, not a distraction. How Strategy Gets Diluted In many successful organizations, strategy is often diluted into a vague sense of direction, replaced by instinct and a shared history in the leadership team. The organization still makes strategic choices, but they’re concentrated among a small circle, and those on the outside learn about them through inference or guesswork rather than clear communication. Three myths tend to keep this pattern in place: Delivery myth: “Strategy distracts us from delivery.” Many senior teams have watched strategy turn into a ceremony: an offsite, a deck, a long list of initiatives, and a warm sense of alignment that fades as soon as hard decisions come up. Leaders who care about delivery think of strategy as time away from delivering results. But strategy supports delivery when it addresses recurring questions that slow work down, such as which customers come first, what quality means, how margin is traded against growth, which risks are worth taking, and which opportunities are declined even when they look attractive. A useful distinction helps here: Planning allocates actions within your control; strategy is a set of choices about how you will win. Alignment myth: “We’re aligned because we’ve been together for years.” Leadership groups can move quickly because they’ve learned each other’s instincts, developed a shorthand, and trust each other. They can anticipate where the CEO, founder, or business leader will land on a trade-off. But that familiarity also creates blind spots as the organization grows. New leaders, partners, and teams don’t share the same history and context, so what feels obvious at the top can feel ambiguous elsewhere. People start guessing what matters, then make different calls while still believing they’re “aligned.” Resilience myth: “We’ll handle shocks when they arrive.” Strong leaders often improvise well in a crisis, and many organizations have stories that prove it. The challenge is that responding to shocks requires different leaders to make immediate decisions in different places, sometimes before the senior team can convene. If they don’t have a common frame to work within—expressed through a strategy —they make conflicting calls, which can cause confusion, delay, and avoidable escalation. The Strategy Deficit That’s the practical heart of what I call a “strategy deficit”: the gap between the strategy an organization is living and the strategy it can explain and apply consistently beyond the senior group. When business is going smoothly in a steady state, this gap lurks under the surface. It comes to the fore when the organization has to make strategic decisions in response to developments—for example, in response to a shift in customer sentiment, a competitor’s moves, the arrival of a new set of leaders, or a period of uncertainty—faster than the senior team can coordinate informally. Those are also the moments when attempts to “sell strategy” can misfire. Leaders who feel they’re performing well tend to resist anything that sounds like an imported process or corporate theatre. Persuasion by envy—“look at what admired companies do”—can heighten that resistance because it frames strategy as imitation rather than as a source of advantage. It’s more persuasive to frame strategy as a source of decision clarity for the situations the organization is already facing. Strategy becomes useful to doubters when it keeps focus intact and makes decisions easier to repeat across the organization. Six actions can help you position strategy in a way that resonates with skeptical leaders: 1. Define strategy as the choices you’ll use to make decisions. When I asked the CEO what he meant by “we don’t have a strategy,” he didn’t mean the organization lacked direction or focus. He meant the top team didn’t need more process. We used a definition that stayed close to his reality: strategy as a small set of choices and trade-offs the leadership team can rely on so that the same debates don’t resurface in different disguises. Research supports this idea of strategy as an ongoing leadership capability rather than a calendar event: a way organizations sense change, align attention, and adjust choices over time. A quick way to make this definition concrete is to ask: Which decisions do we keep coming back to when the logic isn’t fully stated? For example, resource allocation, pricing exceptions, which customer to serve first when capacity is tight, and which risks get accepted by default. Those recurring decisions are the raw material for strategy. 2. Start with a decision the team is already facing. Skeptics rarely change their minds because of a generic argument about the importance of strategy—but they might when a live decision exposes the limitations of relying on instinct and unspoken understandings. Together with the CEO’s team, we chose a decision that was already shaping behavior across functions: how to respond to a competitor’s move into an adjacent segment the CEO had always treated as “not our territory.” Around the table, the instinct was to copy the move, matching the competitor’s offer and message, hoping that customers would stick with them. It felt decisive, and it also raised a more demanding question: What would that response pull the organization away from doing? We used the competitor move as the working case and asked a small set of questions that the team could answer without jargon: What decision do we have to make in the next 30 days? Position it as a choice between two options. What would we be saying no to if we choose Option A? And if we choose Option B? What must be true for this choice to be the right one? What precedent are we setting? What downstream decisions might this lead to? Those questions surfaced the real choice: what the organization would defend and what it would stop chasing. 3. Ask what a new leader would need to know. A strategy deficit starts to show up as the organization grows and more decisions get made beyond the small group that built the business. A founder’s instinct or a long-tenured leadership team’s shorthand can carry a company a long way. But new executives, partners, and teams still need a shared basis for priorities and trade-offs to move quickly without constant escalation. A simple test brings this into view. We asked each senior leader to write a one-page “new leader brief” that answered five questions: What are we trying to win at, and how will we recognize a win? Who are we built for—what “job” are we helping them do—and whom do we deprioritize to stay focused? When we say words like “premium/speed/reliability,” what do we mean? What are the three priorities that matter most right now, and what trade-offs do they create? What three decision rules should leaders apply without escalating? I then compared what people wrote. The point was to see whether the organization’s logic was shared or there were different versions among the senior leaders. With this team, the gaps surfaced quickly. Leaders described different versions of the core challenge and the “win,” which resulted in more priorities than were helpful. They also relied on familiar labels—“premium,” “speed,” “reliability”—as if those words had shared definitions. They didn’t. Each meant something different in practice, which sent mixed signals to downstream teams, triggered more escalation, and made execution feel harder than it needed to be. Business unit leaders and functional heads can run the same test with their teams. It’s one of the quickest ways to turn tacit expectations into language people can use, and to make strategy easier to carry into day-to-day decisions. 4. Settle the trade-offs you keep revisiting. The new leader brief shows whether the strategy is usable. The next step is to reduce the recurring debates that keep resurfacing in different forms. Most teams claiming they have no strategy are already operating with one. The work here is to identify the handful of trade-offs that consistently guide decisions, especially when there are competing priorities. A short exercise can be done in 30 minutes. Ask each senior leader to answer privately, then compare their responses: What are the three trade-offs we keep revisiting? For each trade-off, what’s our default? What’s the exception, and who can make the decision? What will we stop doing as a result? How will we know we’re drifting? What assumption makes this trade-off sensible, and what’s the trigger to revisit it? The value lies in the comparison, because it surfaces when leaders make different calls while believing they’re aligned. It also creates space for a useful kind of discovery; strategy work often reveals risks that success has kept hidden. In this case, the exercise changed the team’s perception of the competitor’s move. Matching it had initially sounded like a straightforward response. But once the team clarified what it was protecting and what it was prepared to trade off, a different picture emerged. Matching would have stretched delivery capacity, blurred the differentiation story, and encouraged a growing set of exceptions that would be hard to unwind. Settling the trade-offs gave the team a clearer basis for deciding what to defend, what to decline, and which line to hold when the next provocation arrived. 5. Use AI to synthesize what you already do, then test it with a visual. By this point, most leadership teams already have the raw material for a strategy. Much of it sits in documents they don’t usually label as “strategy” at all: board presentations, investor updates, marketing narratives, product roadmaps, pricing papers, customer research, sales win/loss notes, operational KPIs, and even the CEO’s town hall messages. Taken together, these artifacts reveal what the organization is already choosing to prioritize, what it tends to protect, and where it’s holding back. AI tools can help by synthesizing the material into a shared draft that the leadership team can react to, refine, and use. Before you use any tool, strip out confidential, proprietary, and personal data from the materials you provide, and use approved enterprise tools and settings rather than consumer defaults. With the tech company, we started with a tight, relevant set of artifacts : recent board updates, investment cases, product roadmaps, quarterly business review notes, win/loss summaries, key customer feedback, and leadership communications. We asked the tool for three outputs in plain language: A draft description of the strategy, expressed as choices: where you concentrate resources, where you hold back, and what you tend to prioritize when priorities compete. A list of inconsistencies, showing where different parts of the organization seem to be operating with different logic or definitions. A short new leader briefing, capturing the priorities and decision rules someone would need in order to make good calls quickly. We then shared the draft with the leadership team, positioning it as a contribution and an opportunity for improvement. We asked each executive to highlight what was accurate, what needed revision, and which trade-off was missing. This kept the conversation focused on judgment and choice, grounded in the organization’s own evidence. Later, we turned the revised draft into a single-slide visual of the strategy—a clear description showing the core choices and how they connect. The discipline of boiling strategy down into one visual forces precision, and it quickly shows where leaders’ mental models diverge. 6. Run a shock test so the strategy holds up under pressure. A shock test brings strategy into the conditions where leaders most need it: where time is short, information is incomplete, and decisions get made in several places at once. Choose one plausible scenario . Keep the setup concrete: what has happened, what’s at risk, and what has to be decided in the next 48 hours. I ran a 45-minute session with the senior team and a small number of operational leaders who would have to act immediately, using four questions: In the first 48 hours, what are the three decisions we must make, and who owns each one? What do we push forward, and what do we put on hold for now? What is off limits in this scenario because it would weaken our long-term position? What coordination failure is most likely—and what simple rule prevents it? AI can play a useful “teammate” role in the room. We fed it the scenario and the current strategic choices, then asked for options, second-order effects, and questions the team should address before committing. We treated it as an input and a disruptor to existing thinking, not the answer, so we used it with careful supervision and interpretation. We then captured the outputs on one page: where you play, how you win, the trade-offs you accept, decision rules for uncertainty, and the assumption you want to watch most closely . . . . The pride in “we don’t have a strategy” often comes from a sense of achievement. But strategy becomes valuable when this success is supported by clarity that others can use. Leaders across the organization respond faster and more consistently when they share the same decision rules. That’s when strategy stops feeling like a distraction and starts feeling like an advantage.
Strategy Leadership Decision-Making Organizational Behavior Business Performance
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