The 3 Biggest Myths About Strategy

We encounter myths in most realms of our lives, and the discipline of strategy thinking is no exception. Here are three of my favourite ones I’ve encountered over the years advising companies about it:

Myth 1: Our strategy is to be … 

“I don’t know where we are going – we don’t have a strategy”. This is something I hear a lot when facilitating strategy meetings and helping organisations develop their strategy. 

Perhaps the correct translation should be “I don’t know what we want to achieve, why we want those things and how we will achieve them”.

Interestingly, mission is your current purpose and vision is your future purpose, or aspirational end game. 

Goals are what you are trying to achieve, and your strategy is your framework for making good decisions and how you will allocate resources to achieve your goals. 

Myth 2: Strategy is an annual thing

Thinking about strategy as some kind of long-term commitment is just wrong. Strategy is not about the long term, or in fact the short term. 

It’s about the core fundamentals of how the business works: value creation, the drivers to deliver it, the framework for decision making, and the resources needed in the right place, at the right time, doing the right things to achieve your goals. 

Strategy is something that should be tested and reviewed continuously (a lot happens in a year) so you can respond to change and make sure you can turn in the right direction as situations evolve to meet your goals.

Myth 3: We don’t need a strategy; we just need to execute and be agile

Agility is a capability, which of course provides operational benefits, and can assist with execution. 

A strategy is a framework for decision-making, a set of guiding principles which can be applied as the situation evolves to meet your goals. 

Lots of start-ups (and established businesses) fail not because of a lack of agility (capability), but because they turn in the wrong direction (strategy). The absence of a coherent strategy leads to making poor decisions.

A good strategy provides a clear framework, consisting of a set of principles, that defines the actions people in the business should take (and not take) and the things they should prioritise (and not prioritise) to achieve the desired and agreed goals as as situations evolve.