Many strategies do not fail on direction. They fail because nobody notices when the direction stops being right.
That is rarely for lack of care. It is the format: a strategy is decided as a document, at a retreat, for three to five years. After that it is communicated — and then the organisation gets on with work. The assumptions it rests on are written down nowhere explicitly. So nobody can establish that one of them no longer holds.
The talk describes a different way of working: strategy as a running process with a fixed rhythm instead of an annual document. That is not a call to plan more often — on the contrary, it usually means less planning and more reviewing.
Where the annual document fails
- The assumptions are invisible. Every strategy rests on assumptions about the market, technology, regulation and its own capabilities. If they are not written down, their disappearance cannot be noticed.
- The review has no date. “We will look at that when the time comes” means, in practice: when it can no longer be overlooked anyway.
- Stopping is not provided for. Initiatives once decided carry on, because ending them is nobody's job.
- The document becomes property. Whoever wrote it defends it. A factual correction then turns into a personal defeat.
What “living” concretely means
Not permanent restructuring — that is the obvious misreading and a reliable way to exhaust an organisation. Three sober things are meant:
First: the assumptions are written down, one sentence each, in a place everyone knows.
Second: every assumption gets a review date and a criterion — how would we recognise that it no longer holds? That question is uncomfortable and therefore rarely asked; it is also the one that carries the most.
Third: there is a rhythm for reviewing, and a group that does it. Usually quarterly, in the same group that took the decision. Without a fixed date it does not happen.
Who the talk is for
For management boards and leadership teams that have a strategy and are dissatisfied with how it is being implemented — and for organisations currently working on a new one that want to stop it sharing the fate of the last.
It is too early for groups that have no direction yet. There, working on the direction itself is the first step.
What your team can do afterwards
- Name their own strategic assumptions — in experience a manageable number, and regularly at least one of them is contested within the group.
- Say, for each assumption, how its disappearance would be recognised.
- Set a review rhythm that fits the business rather than the reporting calendar.
- End an initiative without it counting as one person's failure.
