When the strategy story reveals there’s no strategy

When a company asks me to help them craft their strategy story, I ask for their strategy documents. They’ll often send me a few PowerPoint decks, maybe some Word documents, and sometimes a spreadsheet or two. More often than I’d like, I start reading, and my heart sinks.

There are usually goals. There are targets. There are big ambitions. There are initiatives, programs, workstreams, pillars, priorities and transformation plans. But often there’s no clear overarching strategy. No clear set of strategic choices. And without strategic choices, there’s no real strategy story to tell.

A strategy story has to explain the strategy. It has to help people understand why the organisation’s moving in this direction, what’s changed, what matters most now, and what people need to do differently. If the strategy itself isn’t clear, the story can’t fix it. At best, the story becomes a more polished version of the confusion.

A moment that made this clear

This first became obvious to me in 2012, when we received a call from a global resources company. Their head of strategy felt they needed a strategy story. On the first call were the head of strategy, the head of communications and me. The communications leader was confident they already had the story, so I asked him to share it.

He talked for a while, but he wasn’t telling a story. He listed priorities, shared opinions, referred to reports, and described workstreams already underway. There was plenty of activity, and much of it sounded important, but there was no narrative thread. No sequence of events. No clear shift. No sense of why this strategy, why now, and what choices the company was making.

After a few minutes, the head of strategy interrupted him and said, “We clearly don’t have a story.” Ouch!

He was right. They had plenty of activity, but no clear overarching strategy story. There was no simple explanation of the shift they needed to make, the choices they were making, or why those choices mattered now. So before we could craft the strategy story, we had to help them get clear on the strategy itself. We then developed the story and worked with them on an animation to bring it to life. They loved it, but more importantly, it gave them a clearer way to talk about where they were heading. It set them on a new path.

That experience has repeated itself many times since.

So what is strategy?

Strategy is the set of big moves an organisation will make to solve a problem or pursue an opportunity, so it can achieve its ambition. Those moves are expressed as an integrated set of strategic choices.

Goals aren’t strategy

A goal tells people what you want to achieve: grow revenue, improve margins, lift engagement, increase market share, reduce costs, improve the customer experience. And they are linked to targets. These are all useful, but they’re not strategy. They tell people the destination, not the choices the organisation will make to get there. Most people in a business don’t struggle because they don’t know the goal. They struggle because they don’t know what to do when the goal creates a trade-off.

For example, should we chase growth or protect margin? Should we invest in a new product line or double down on the core? Should we move faster or wait until the plan is safer? Should we use technology to simplify work or keep doing things the familiar way? Should we focus our best people on the hardest problems or spread effort evenly across everything? This is where strategy lives. Not in the ambition, but in the choice.

Initiatives aren’t strategy either

Many organisations also mistake a list of initiatives for a strategy and call it their strategic plan. The plan might say things like, “Improve customer experience, digitise the business, simplify operations, develop our people, and grow in priority markets.”

That might all be sensible work. In fact, it usually is. But it still doesn’t tell people how to choose when priorities compete. What happens when improving customer experience adds cost? What happens when digitising the business makes work harder in the short term? What happens when growing in a priority market pulls resources away from the core?

Initiatives describe activity. Strategic choices guide decisions. That’s the difference.

Ferrari’s three choices

I recently listened to the Acquired podcast about Ferrari, and it had a great example of strategic choices. After Enzo Ferrari died in 1988, the company went into a difficult period. By the early 1990s, Ferrari was in trouble. The road cars had lost some of their edge, Formula 1 performance had faded, demand had weakened, and the company had started to damage what made Ferrari special. By 1993, Ferrari’s revenue was about €230 million, and it was in the red. It was no longer enough to rely on the badge. The business needed a clearer way forward.

That’s when Luca di Montezemolo came in as CEO. Acquired summarised his turnaround around three priorities: the team, the technology and the myth. Whether or not Ferrari used those exact words internally is hard to say, but it’s a useful way to understand the broad shape of the turnaround.

To turn those priorities into strategic choices, I’d take the phrasing one step further. “The team, the technology and the myth” are useful labels, but they describe topics rather than giving advice. Strategic choices are best phrased as snippets of advice because they should help people decide what to do. So I’d put them this way:

• Win on the Track
• Use Technology to Lead
• Protect the Myth

The three choices worked together. Winning on the track fed the Ferrari myth. Using technology to lead meant Ferrari couldn’t simply rely on heritage; the cars had to keep earning the badge. Protecting the myth meant resisting the temptation to chase volume or easy money if it weakened scarcity, prestige or desire.

Together, these choices worked like a flywheel. Winning on the track strengthened the myth. The myth created desire, scarcity and pricing power. That gave Ferrari the confidence and resources to keep investing in technology. Better technology helped the cars perform, which helped Ferrari win on the track. The flywheel kept turning.

That’s the point. Ferrari didn’t recover by simply producing as many cars as possible. It recovered by getting clearer about what made it valuable. By 2001, Ferrari was reporting US$486 million in sales in the first half alone. By 2011, revenue had reached about €2 billion, almost nine times the 1993 level.

Fewer choices are better than more

It’s also worth noticing the number. Three choices. Not seven. Not twelve. Not a long list of priorities trying to keep everyone happy. In my experience, fewer strategic choices are almost always better than more. Three is ideal. Four is the upper limit. Once you go beyond four, people stop remembering them, the choices start to blur, and the story becomes too complex to tell. The strategy begins to look like a list of initiatives again.

This is hard for executive teams because leaving things out feels risky. Every function wants to see its work reflected. Every leader wants their priority named. But strategy is partly the discipline of not naming everything. If everything matters equally, nothing guides a decision. Ferrari’s three choices worked because they were few, connected and sharp.

The wording matters

The wording matters more than people think. I often see strategy language that’s accurate but unusable. It’s carefully worded. It’s technically correct. It’s approved by everyone. And no one can remember it, say it, or use it.

That’s a problem. If people can’t say the strategy, they can’t spread it. If they can’t remember it, they can’t act on it. If they can’t explain it in their own words, it won’t travel beyond the senior team.

This is especially important in large organisations. The wording has to work for the executive team, but also for managers, team leaders and frontline employees. A strategic choice should be simple enough to repeat, but strong enough to guide action. That’s not easy. It takes work.

A strategic choice helps people decide

A good strategic choice helps someone decide what to do on a Tuesday morning when there are two reasonable options in front of them. It says, “When faced with this kind of trade-off, this is how we choose.” Without that, every team fills in the gaps for itself. And in a large organisation, that means hundreds or thousands of different interpretations of the strategy.

So what does a strategic choice actually do? In simple terms, it solves a decision-making problem. It names the issue the organisation must confront. It points to the behaviour that needs to change. It gives people permission to act differently. And it helps leaders make consistent decisions across the business. When strategy fails, it’s rarely because people didn’t see the PowerPoint deck. It fails because the choices weren’t clear enough, or they weren’t conveyed in a way that was both memorable and meaningful. People heard the words, but they didn’t know what to do differently.

Test 1: What problem is this choice solving?

One of the tests I use is simple: what problem is this strategic choice solving? If that’s not clear, the choice won’t stick. For example, a company might say, “Be more innovative.” That’s a common phrase, but what problem does it solve? Does it mean the company’s too slow to test ideas? Too risk-averse? Too focused on existing products? Too reliant on one market? Too quick to punish failure? Too poor at scaling ideas once they work?

A stronger choice would name the real issue. For example: “Test new ideas before the market forces us to.” Now the questions become more useful. Where are we moving too slowly? What assumptions need testing? What small experiments could we run now? What signals from customers are we ignoring? What would we rather learn cheaply this quarter than painfully in three years? That sort of wording creates a conversation leaders can actually use.

Test 2: The Costanza Maneuver

A real strategic choice also has tension in it. It should make the trade-off visible. If there’s no reasonable alternative, it’s probably not a strategic choice. Years ago, I wrote about a simple test I call the Costanza Maneuver, named after George Costanza from Seinfeld, who decides his new strategy in life is to do the opposite of every instinct he has.

The test is simple: take a strategic choice and consider the opposite. If the opposite sounds like nonsense, you probably haven’t made a real choice. For example, “Act with integrity” isn’t much of a choice. No company’s going to say, “Act without integrity.” In the same way, “Deliver value to customers” sounds good, but the opposite, “Deliver no value to customers”, isn’t a serious strategic alternative.

But I’ve learned there’s an important nuance. You can’t just ask whether the opposite sounds crazy. You also have to ask whether the organisation has, in practice, been living the opposite. A company might say, “Simplify the business.” On paper, the opposite sounds absurd. Who’d openly say, “Let’s make the business more complicated”? But in reality, many organisations do exactly that. They add layers, approvals, reports, meetings, systems and exceptions until the business becomes harder to run.

That’s when the test becomes useful. The opposite might sound silly as a slogan, but it might be alive and well in behaviour. And if that’s true, then the strategic choice is doing real work. It’s naming the shift the organisation needs to make.

So the better questions are: does the opposite sound like a viable strategic option, or has the organisation been behaving that way already? If either is true, you may have found a real choice. If neither is true, you’re probably looking at a platitude.

For example, “Simplify the business” becomes useful when it forces real decisions. What approvals will we remove? What reports will we stop producing? What meetings will disappear? What products, processes or systems will we retire? What will leaders stop asking for? Without those decisions, “simplify” is just a nice word.

Crafting the story tests the strategy

This is where my work often begins. A company thinks it needs a better way to communicate its strategy. But as we start shaping the strategy story, we find gaps. The goals are clear, but the choices aren’t. The initiatives are detailed, but the logic is missing. The ambition is strong, but the decision rules are vague. So before we can tell the strategy story, we have to sharpen the strategy.

That can be uncomfortable, but it’s necessary. A strategy story is not a communication wrapper. It’s not a nicer way to sell a plan that hasn’t been thought through. Done well, the process of creating the story tests the strategy. It exposes what’s missing. It shows where the choices overlap. It reveals where the language is too abstract. It forces leaders to answer the questions people across the business will ask: why this, why now, what are we moving away from, what are we choosing instead, what will we do differently, what will we stop doing, and what happens when there’s a trade-off? These aren’t just communication questions. They’re strategy questions.

The Tuesday morning test

One question cuts through a lot of noise: if I were running a team tomorrow, what would I do differently because of this choice? If the answer’s clear, the choice has value. If the answer’s vague, the wording needs work. A good strategic choice should help a leader make a real decision. It should guide investment. It should shape priorities. It should affect what gets attention. It should help people say no. That last one is important. A strategy that only adds more work isn’t really a strategy. It’s a burden. Strategy should help people decide what matters most.

What strong strategic choices have in common

The strongest strategic choices I’ve seen tend to do five things. They solve a real problem, rather than making a generic statement of good intent. They involve a real trade-off, helping people choose between competing goods, not between good and bad. They build on an advantage, answering the question, “How are we going to win, given who we are and what we can do?” They’re practical enough to be used by people beyond the executive team. And they’re easy to say, which doesn’t mean simplistic, just clear.

Strategy becomes real in decisions

A strategy only becomes real when it changes decisions. Not when it’s launched. Not when it’s printed on a poster. Not when the CEO presents it at the town hall. It becomes real when someone in the business faces a choice and acts differently because of it.

That’s why strategic choices matter so much. They’re the bridge between ambition and action. And they’re the raw material of a good strategy story.

So when a company asks me to help craft its strategy story, I’m always listening for the choices. If they’re there, we can shape a story that helps people understand, remember and act. If they’re not there, we have to do the harder work first.

Because you can’t tell the story of a strategy that doesn’t yet exist.