Act one: the decision
A business leader sighed: "Forget it. We are not doing strategy."
"Why?" I asked.
"The world is fast, the strategy is slow. I don't want you to spend months aligning and writing documents that will be outdated by the time you are done."
Fair. He wasn't wrong, either. Most strategies do take too long and say too little. But what he actually said was: we're choosing speed over direction. Which, whether he liked the word or not, was a strategy.
We moved on. We shipped things. The energy was great. It lasted about three months.
Act two: the panic
"We can't work without strategy," — a manager on my team, spread between frustration and genuine panic, both coming right through my monitor. "Without strategy, we don't know what to do. We don't know what's good and what's bad."
"When it's bad, you'll know," I joked.
She didn't laugh.
"How can we make plans? How will our work be judged?"
She wasn't asking a philosophical question. She was asking a survival question. Without a direction to point to, every project becomes a pitch. Every brief needs to justify itself from scratch. Every review is a negotiation, not a checkpoint.
The manager's definition of strategy was: the thing that tells me what to do. She was wrong about that — strategy doesn't tell you what to do. But she was right that something was missing. The missing thing wasn't instructions. It was a frame.
Act three: the weight
A department lead landed on the chair next to me during lunch. I was eating a lasagna.
"I can't work like this anymore. I'm stuck in approvals. My context switching is insufferable. We are doing too many projects."
"Thank you," I replied. "Also, it sounds like you need a strategy."
He didn't need a strategy because he lacked vision. He needed a strategy because without one, every small decision climbed up to him for validation. There was no reference document. No signed-off direction to check against. Twenty project documents, each making its own case, each needing a separate yes.
Strategy, for him, wasn't a grand story. It was aggregated approval. Sign off on a direction once. Then just check if the work fits.
This is the part I haven't seen yet. But I know it's coming. When you remove the big direction, you don't remove decisions. You distribute them — into every meeting, every review, every Slack thread. The weight doesn't disappear. It just moves down.
The story
Three different people. Three different complaints. Three different definitions of the word "strategy." One of them decided to skip it. The other two are living inside the consequences.
My favorite definition of strategy is that it's just the story about solving the problem. What's the problem. What's the solution. That simple.
And if you read this far — I just told you one.
My Strategy from Space course starts April 1. For senior marketers who've grown deep in one area and want to see the whole system — this is the map. Everything else you can look up.