Every year, around this time, most large organizations go through the same ritual. Someone asks you to build next year’s strategy, along with the connected plans, forecasts, goals, and resource requests. And every year, I watch smart, capable people enter what I’ve come to call an endless loop of strategy paralysis.
It goes something like this:
- “Leadership needs to give us our success metrics, otherwise we cannot start building a strategy.”
- But then: “How can we commit to any metric without knowing what our resource allocation is going to be?”
- Which leads to: “How can we make a resource request without knowing our strategy?”
And… well, the loop begins at step one again.
In roughly 30 years of my career, I’ve seen this cycle play out more times than I can count. It’s frustrating, wasteful, and entirely avoidable. The problem is that this paralysis exposes two fundamental issues that many don’t recognize:
- A desire to be told what to do – waiting for someone else to provide the strategy. Sometimes people don’t even notice this motive behind their hesitancy. And it is an effect re-inforced further by risk-averse leaders who stop their experts and colleagues from stepping up in the first place.
- Not knowing what a strategy actually is – confusing strategy with plans, metrics, or resource requests. Yes, I’m serious. Many discussions I witnessed were actually a hidden desire to remove the risk involved in strategy building and replace it with planning instead. However, just because we call something a strategy does not mean it actually is…
So, now that we named these two core issues, let’s tackle each.
The Comfortable Trap of Waiting
It’s fair to expect and request input from leadership and stakeholders before building a strategy. In fact, any strategy worth our time really needs to answer critical questions. But here’s the thing: in the absence of this input, senior and smart people sometimes resort to simply waiting for it because there are plenty of other things to do in the meantime.
I get it. It feels safer. Less risky. But this approach has real problems:
It hands over strategy authorship to others. It delays necessary conversations until it’s too late. It wastes the expertise and perspective of senior people. And it creates a cycle of dependency rather than leadership.
In a way, people try to stay within the space of “planning” because they’re scared to make the “bet.” Taking a risk is scary, and maybe they also lack what they would consider a novel strong idea. However, this is a misunderstanding: your expertise is what should give you meaningful questions and opinions. Combining these will lead the way. You don’t have a stroke of genius or a flash of insight to work on a strategy that matters.
There’s a better way: identify the questions that need answers before moving forward, and state educated guesses or opinions as placeholders to work with while you simultaneously pursue the search for actual answers. This will lift the fog and light the way. Also, a strategy can be a group effort, you don’t have to do it alone!
For senior people, every unanswered question should be an opportunity to leave your own mark – either by working on getting it answered or by inserting your own expert opinion.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you ask to be given a strategy first before doing anything, you surrender your role as a senior expert and leader. It may feel safer, but it means you’re not using your potential and you’ll be subject to the whims of others.
What Actually Is a Strategy, Anyway?
I’ve watched people create something they called “strategy” that in reality was either simply a plan (a step – by – step outline for how to get a well – defined result) or some overblown document claiming to be strategic for something that didn’t deserve a strategy discussion to start with.
So, what makes something strategic?
A strategy addresses something that is important – of sufficient desirability and complexity to warrant strategic thinking. Something yielding a high reward when achieved or posing a substantial risk when failed. It’s uncertain – no one really knows for sure how to achieve it. And its approach is hypothetical – combined with a grounded hypothesis, a theory of how it may be accomplished.
This hypothesis/theory is what I call “a bet” – a strategic decision based on the best available information, acknowledging that we don’t have certainty.
A plan, by contrast, addresses a known and understood problem by breaking it down into steps. Let’s put it like this: If you know how to do it, it’s a plan, not a strategy.
A strategy requires dealing with uncertainty and making educated bets about how to achieve something important that hasn’t been done before (or at least not in this context, in this way).
And in case you wonder: Yes, for any strategy you will also create plans eventually. You take a desired future end state (the vision), combine it with a hypothesis (the bet), break this down in sub – goals you know how to achieve for which you develop plans, then you execute really well and measure if that is getting you closer to your vision. If it does, this confirms your hypothesis. If it doesn’t it may either falsify your hypothesis or expose a flaw in your thinking you need to address…
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to strategy. Here’s what we need:
The Core Ingredients
If you’re going to build a real strategy, you need these ingredients:
1. A Vision for a Desirable Future State
A clear description of an ideal outcome or future state. It must be sufficiently clear to allow forming a concrete theory about how it might come to be. It can be a statement or a longer description, but it must be “large enough” – meaning it’s worth the strategic effort and complexity.
Important note: If there is no vision but you’re trying to do something new and undefined, the task is not strategy development but vision development first. Strategy cannot exist without a clear vision of what you’re trying to achieve.
2. Strategic Questions That Need Answers
Questions that must be answered to move toward the vision. Some questions you can answer based on your expertise. Some questions need input from others (leadership, stakeholders, experts). Some questions require educated assumptions – bets. I suggest you call these our in your strategy document. Make your assumption clear and then state your assumed answers. They are the framework that informs your strategic decisions!
3. The “Bets” – Strategic Decisions
Strategic decisions are made when you substitute unanswerable questions with educated assumptions. The element of the bet comes in whenever you have multiple options and you decide which path to take. In aggregate this forms your hypotheses about how to achieve the vision. They should be grounded in your expertise and experience. They acknowledge uncertainty while committing to a direction.
Strategy authors have a responsibility to form educated assumptions on questions they are experts in and push to identify gaps necessary for success. It is ok not to know for sure, it is your role as an expert to stand by the things you know and understand which parts remain unknown until you finally move ahead.
4. A Metric Framework (Not Targets!)
Define what type/kind of metrics would signal success (e.g., “user engagement metrics” vs “revenue metrics”). Don’t require specific values yet (e.g., “increase by 20%”). The framework tells you what to measure, not what target to hit.
Specific metric values come later, after you’ve built the strategy and understand resource allocation.
Here’s the key insight: If you insist on knowing the metric values first, you’re confusing cause and effect. Metrics should tell you if your strategy is working – they’re a measurement tool, not a requirement to engage in strategy building. Once the strategy is done and not a moment earlier you should define measurable milestones and then build a plan towards those. But before we can do that we move on with step 5…
5. Implementation Breakdown
Break the strategy down into implementation phases (major stages of work). Break phases down into implementation steps (concrete actions). Each phase should represent a logical progression toward the vision. Each step should be actionable and measurable.
6. Resource Request
Based on the strategy, phases, and steps. Only after you know what you’re trying to achieve and how. Asking for resource grants before having a strategy puts the order on its head and is another attempt to delegate strategy building away.
7. Risk Assessment and Mitigation
Every strategy involves bets, which means inherent risk. Acceptable risk requires buy-in from leadership – the higher the risk, the more buy-in needed. Any good strategy should have a section on risk mitigation if the potential damage is beyond the scope of established accepted operational costs.
Being clear-eyed about risk signals expertise of the strategy authors. Identify what failure looks like for each major bet. Define acceptable failure modes and when to abort vs. pivot vs. persist.
8. Defined Milestones and Review Triggers
Phases should lead to defined milestones based on the agreed metric framework. Milestones are based on the agreed-on metrics and should be measurable. Missing or overshooting milestones should always trigger a review and an iteration, or potentially an abort.
Defining solid milestones is part of the bet – this is what turns a simple gamble into an informed investment strategy. Milestones allow us to see if our strategy truly delivers what we hoped and therefore is “good.” This is how you know if a strategy is working – it’s not just about final outcomes, but about progress markers that validate (or invalidate) your bets along the way.
9. Buy-In and Stakeholder Management
Any strategy can only be built by people who have the mandate to do it. Often a well-laid-out argument is a very good pathway to receiving buy-in for aspects that are not yet defined. In large companies, a strategy is often built within a pre-defined set of responsibilities – not everything needs to be renegotiated. Some ownership is often already safe to assume based on existing roles and responsibilities.
It is important to seek the license for things that expand or change these set definitions. Distinguish between what you can own based on existing mandate vs. what requires explicit approval.
10. Form a Resource Request Based on the Above
Of course, what looks like a linear process may sometimes take twist and turnes while you solicit feedback, win stakeholder buy-in and so on. However, at some point you should be sufficiently sure what direction you’re heading at and what parameters will influence success and outcomes. This is when you write your resource request. A resource request in its simplest form is three things: Money, People, Time. Don’t confuse “people” with headcount. It may be virtual team members, support from other teams, work via agency resources and so on. Plan it out! The same goes for time and money. Often you’ll find yourself in a situation where these three factors directly depend on each other. This is one way how you can react to concrete change requests on metrics or time scale coming from your stakeholders.
11. Go Through Rounds of Discussions and Refinement
Well, it is obvious but still important to call out: Things will constantly move, this is a feature not a bug. Engage with leadership and stakeholders, refine the strategy, adjust bets, clarify vision. Seek buy-in for aspects that expand beyond your existing mandate. Helping or maybe even leading a group of people along this path is half the fun of building a strategy!
12. Commit to Resource Allocation and Realistic Metric Values as Milestones
Now that you have the full picture, you can commit to specific targets and resource allocation. Measure frequently and be honest to yourself.
13. Establish Review Triggers
Define when missing or overshooting milestones triggers review, iteration, or potential abort. This is how you’ll know if your strategy is truly delivering what you hoped.
So, In Summary: What It All Comes Down To
The paralysis cycle is real, but it’s not inevitable. The next time someone asks you to build a strategy, remember: you have the expertise. You have the mandate (or can seek it for what expands beyond it). You can make the bets. You can lead.
Don’t wait for permission. Start with vision, build your bets, define your milestones, and see where it takes you.
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