insights: Strategy

Good strategy helps people to make choices – not just describe what matters. 

You’ve developed a strategy. It makes sense. It’s been well thought through, and it’s been shared across the team. Everyone can see their part of it. 

Teams are busy – even too busy; work is happening, but progress overall feels slower than expected. Nothing seems to be really changing. Everything is moving forward... and that’s a problem. 

When everything is a priority, you don’t have a strategy. You have a list. And you’re possibly on the way to burning out your teams. 

You’ve seen “everything strategies” before. They’re what happens when we see the extent of what we’re trying to achieve, the complexity of the world we’re operating in, and we recognise the need to bring all of our people with us. 

They are absolutely the right drives, but they can take us to the wrong place. To a strategy that describes where we’re at; not where we’re going, or how we’ll get there. 

"Everything strategies” become a collection of everything that matters... Growth. Customer experience. Innovation. Risk. People. Partnerships. Delivery. All of these are valid, but together they don’t give direction. Like an everything bagel, but less delicious.

Your strategy, done well, should be about creating clarity that helps people make decisions. Especially when things are uncertain, complex, or under pressure. 

At its best, strategy gives people a way to answer questions like: 

• What matters most right now? 
• What will we prioritise and invest in? 
• What tradeoffs are we willing to make? 
• What can I safely not do? 

Strategy doesn’t live at the centre, in the exec team, or the board. It certainly doesn’t live in a document. It lives in the day-to-day decisions made by the people delivering work at every level of the organisation. 

Which means it has to be usable. Clear enough that people can apply it in real situations. Practical enough that it shapes choices, not just conversations. 

If your strategy doesn’t make decisions easier, it isn’t doing its job. 

Take universities as an example. Most strategies start with the same broad ingredients: 

• Teach well. 
• Do excellent research. 
• Engage with the community. 

Fair enough, every university should probably be doing these things. But they are baseline functions, not a strategy. 

Some institutions go further, identifying priority domains or areas of focus (technology; health; sustainability). But even then, these often describe where they will play, rather than what distinctive outcome they are trying to achieve. 

They all matter, but the question is what they are in service of? Are we here to: 

• Drive innovation for the economy? 
• Build a world-class workforce? 
• Solve complex societal challenges? 

Each of these leads to different choices, different trade-offs, and a different allocation of effort. 

Without that clarity, organisations default to doing everything, and become harder to distinguish, both internally and externally. 

So now we’ve explored the pitfalls, what can we do about it? 

1. Build it with the people who will use it. Start as you mean to carry on. If strategy is going to guide decisions, it needs to be shaped by the people making them. 
2. Be clear about what success looks like. What are you ultimately trying to achieve, and what will define you if you succeed? 
3. Make trade-offs explicit. What are you choosing to prioritise, and what are you choosing not to? 
4. Stop something. What no longer matters in the same way? What can be closed out or deprioritised? 
5. Test how it impacts real decisions. How does your strategy become practical, and guide day-to-day choices? 

In complex environments, strategy has to exist beyond the document. It needs to live and breathe through your people. In decisions, behaviours and day-to-day judgement. 

Set it free and let it live. Sounds compelling, but what does it look like? 

That’s where we’ll go next.