If two people can use your strategy to justify opposite decisions, your strategy is clearly not working.
And it might be the best thing that can happen to your strategy.
Because now you know. You’ve seen exactly where your strategy breaks. And can refine it.
But what usually happens now? Everyone’s frustrated, politics play out behind the scenes, and rather sooner than later the conclusion is that we need a new strategy.
Usually, that’s a mistake.
Why? Because you discard the only concrete evidence you had. The exact moment where reality tested your words and found them wanting.
Granted, a new strategy may sound fresh, but it will be untested again. And so, the cycle repeats, disagreement will happen again, debates follow, politics, frustration, etc.
If this feels familiar, you’re not alone. It happens in almost every organization.
And for very similar reasons:
First, you lack a reliable way to expose where your strategy actually breaks. You sense misalignment, but it shows up as endless discussion rather than a clear diagnosis of which words exactly create the ambiguity.
Second, even when you see the problem, you do not have a method to fix it. The new strategy only repeats the cycle.
Third, you never gain confidence that your strategy will hold under pressure. As proven by experience.
All three problems have the same root.
Your strategy is not being refined where it fails.
Instead, you always start fresh and dismiss the learning.
From a communication perspective, this is a huge mistake.
A strategy is a tool for making decisions. Its words must be precise enough that different people, facing the same situation, arrive at the same conclusion.
New words almost never achieve this. That level of precision doesn’t come from thinking harder in a workshop. It comes from using the strategy in real decisions and fixing the exact places where it breaks.
When I work on this with my clients, we usually do two things:
- Take the last decision where people reasonably disagreed.
- Find the exact words that allowed both sides to be right.
Now we know what to refine. The trick is then to use the refined words to decide the original question. If it still allows two opposite answers, it’s still not precise enough. And so we refine again.
So we don’t rewrite the whole strategy. We sharpen the words exactly where reality has shown us they fail.
This is how strong strategies are built. And that’s what the debates are for.
They help you turn a good strategy into a great one. One that’s precise enough to guide action.
Keep lighting the path,
Michael
