Every year, organisations spend significant time and money producing strategy documents that nobody reads after the away-day. This is not a mystery. It is a predictable outcome of a process that optimises for the document rather than for the decisions the document is supposed to support.

The document is not the strategy

A strategy document is a record of a set of decisions. The strategy is the decisions themselves, held in the heads and habits of the people who have to act on them. When a strategy document sits unused, it usually means the decisions were never really made. The document recorded a set of aspirations, or a set of things everyone could agree on without committing to anything. That is not a strategy. It is a list of intentions.

What makes a strategy document usable

A usable strategy document answers three questions clearly enough that a manager in the middle of the organisation can use it to make a decision on a Tuesday afternoon without calling a meeting. First: what are we trying to achieve, and by when? Second: what are we not going to do, even if it looks attractive? Third: how will we know if we are on track? Most strategy documents answer the first question vaguely and skip the other two entirely.

The process problem

The process that produces the document matters as much as the document itself. If the people who have to implement the strategy were not involved in making it, they will not own it. If the leadership team did not surface and resolve their real disagreements during the process, those disagreements will resurface during implementation. A strategy process that avoids conflict produces a strategy that cannot survive contact with reality.

What we do differently

When Guild Branch runs a strategy development process, the document is the last thing we produce, not the first. We spend the majority of the time on the decisions: surfacing the real options, testing assumptions, working through the disagreements. The document is a record of what was decided and why. That is what makes it useful six months later, when the context has shifted and someone needs to remember what the reasoning was.

A practical test

Before you commission a strategy process, ask this question: at the end of it, will a manager three levels below the leadership team be able to use the output to make a decision without asking for clarification? If the answer is probably not, the process needs to be redesigned before it starts. We are happy to talk through what that redesign might look like.

If your organisation has a strategy document that is not being used, the problem is almost certainly in the process that produced it, not in the document itself. That is fixable. Get in touch at hello@guildbranch.com.