Seven Principles for Strategy That Actually Sticks
I wrote these seven principles in 2019. I thought I was writing about digital strategy. Reading them back now, I realise I was writing about AI strategy — six years before most organisations began trying to build one.
The argument I was making in 2019 was that traditional strategic planning was already failing: too slow, too prescriptive, too disconnected from the people who would execute it. AI has taken that problem and accelerated it to the point of crisis. Organisations are now building AI strategies on timelines that are obsolete before the approval process finishes.
The answer is not faster planning. It is different planning. Here are the seven principles I have found most consistently make strategy stick.
1. Avoid premature prescription
Build strategy through an agile, iterative learning journey rather than a drive toward a perfect final document. Experimentation and learning through doing — what I call strategic adventuring — should be valued more highly than exhaustive analysis alone. Expect the strategy to be frequently refined. That is not a sign of weak thinking. It is the only rational response to a world in which the assumptions your strategy rests on can change faster than your planning cycle.
2. Embed strategy in operations
Strategy that lives in the executive suite, brought out once a year for the board and then filed, is not strategy. It is expensive folklore. Good strategy is a decision-making and communication system — built on quality data, transparent logic and shared context — that enables every level of the organisation to make better decisions every day. If your people cannot explain what the strategy means for their work this week, it is not embedded. It is archived.
3. Create co-owners, not consumers
Build strategy in partnership with the people who will execute it. When people help shape the strategy, they understand it, believe in it and fight for it under pressure. Strategy crafted behind closed doors — by executive teams or consultants alone — produces impressive decks and precious little ground-level change. The distinction between a co-owner and a consumer of strategy is the difference between a transformation that takes hold and one that quietly disappears.
4. Design content and context equally
Build a strategy that addresses every dimension of change ahead: customer, operational, financial and technology, plus the leadership and cultural factors that are routinely underweighted. Most organisations spend far too much time on content — the initiatives they want to invest in — and far too little on the context, capability and confidence needed to support adoption. A brilliant strategy executed into a culture that was not prepared for it will fail. A good strategy executed into one that was will succeed.
5. Tell a compelling story
Build the strategy as a story that inspires decisive, coordinated action — not a dense body of analysis fit only for debate among senior executives. Stories take people to places they have never been. Your strategy should use language and imagery each audience understands to generate an actionable picture of where the organisation is headed. If you cannot tell that story in ten minutes to someone outside it, it is not ready.
6. Bring many different minds
Build the strategy with a genuine blend of humanity, creativity, domain expertise and analytical rigour. Resist the proven, predictable path — which reliably delivers incremental improvement at best. Managing a genuinely multi-disciplinary team is tough. It requires creating conditions in which strong-willed, different people listen to each other and exploit their differences for value rather than retreating into their disciplines. The breakthroughs almost always happen at the intersections.
7. Get off the beaten track
Build strategy with out-of-industry insights, unexpected perspectives and experiences that may be more relevant to your customers' future world than so-called best practices. Best practice is, by definition, what the best of your competitors are already doing. It is a floor, not a ceiling. Crashing together perspectives from inside and outside your industry — up and down the organisation — unlocks value at unexpected intersections.
Why these principles matter more now than when I wrote them
AI has made the case for every one of these principles stronger — and become the most powerful tool available for acting on them.
Avoiding premature prescription is easier when AI can generate and stress-test multiple strategic scenarios in hours rather than weeks. Embedding strategy in operations is more achievable when AI tools translate strategic intent into real-time operational signals. Telling a compelling story is faster when AI helps produce visual and narrative frameworks for diverse audiences.
But the most important principle — co-owners not consumers — has become critical precisely because AI strategy affects every knowledge worker simultaneously. The organisations getting AI adoption right are not the ones with the most sophisticated strategies. They are the ones that involved their people in building them.
In 2019 I wrote that strategy confined to the executive suite "can result in great slideware but delivers precious little ground-level change."
Six years later, with AI on every board agenda, that sentence reads like a warning that arrived early.
