Your Strategy Reviews Are Status Meetings in Disguise

Picture your last strategy review.

You almost certainly asked two questions, and asked them well. Are we doing what we said we’d do? And: Is it working — are the numbers moving in the right direction?

Those are good questions. Necessary ones. And they are also, on their own, the anatomy of a status meeting.

Because there are two more questions a real strategy review has to ask, and most reviews never get near them. Are our original assumptions still valid? And: Does anyone still actually believe in this?

The first two questions track whether you’re busy and whether you’re winning. The second two track whether you’re still right and whether you’re still together. And a strategy can be perfectly on track on the first two while quietly dying on the second two — executing an assumption that stopped being true two quarters ago, carried forward by a team that stopped believing it one quarter ago, with a scoreboard that shows green the whole way down.

That’s the trap of the modern review. We’ve gotten very good at tracking activity and results — dashboards, RAG statuses, quarterly business reviews. We’ve gotten very bad at asking the two questions that dashboards can’t answer. And so the review, the one moment specifically designed to keep a strategy alive, becomes the place where its slow death is politely not discussed.

I use a simple rhythm to fix this. Four questions, in order. I call it ARIS:

Action. Are we doing what we committed to? The basic accountability question — did the things we said would happen, happen. Necessary, but only the floor.

Results. Is it working? Are the outcomes we expected actually showing up? This is where most reviews live, and where most of them stop.

Insights. Are our assumptions still valid? This is the question that separates a review from a status meeting. Every strategy is a set of bets about an uncertain world. Some of those bets are already wrong; the market moved, a competitor did something, a customer behaviour shifted. Insights is the discipline of asking, out loud, every single time: is the thing we believed when we made this plan still true? Skip it, and you will execute a broken strategy with total discipline.

Spirit. Is the team still on board and believing? Strategies are lived by people, and people can quietly check out long before they say so. Spirit asks the unaskable in most cultures: does anyone in this room still actually believe in this, or are we going through the motions? A strategy no one believes in is already over; it just hasn’t been declared yet.

Action, Results, Insights, Spirit. The first two you already run. The last two are where a strategy stays alive — and where nearly every review I’ve ever audited goes quiet.

There’s a reason this matters beyond tidiness. If you only track Action and Results, you cannot tell the difference between two completely different failures: an execution problem (we have the right strategy but we’re not delivering it) and a strategic-hypothesis failure (we’re delivering beautifully on a strategy that was wrong). Those demand opposite responses — push harder vs. change course — and organizations that don’t ask the Insights question routinely apply the wrong one. They push harder on a broken bet, or they abandon a sound strategy at the first bad quarter. The Insights question is what lets you tell them apart.

And this reframes what a review is for. A review isn’t a control mechanism — a place to check whether people did their homework. It’s a learning mechanism — a place to find out whether you’re still right, and to adapt while it’s cheap. Strategic conversations beat KPI tracking. Learning beats executing the plan. Feedback beats control. Not because the first things don’t matter, but because the second things are what a machine does, and a strategy is not run by a machine.

Try this at your next review, honestly: after Action and Results, force the room to sit with Insights and Spirit. Don’t let it be rhetorical. You’ll learn more in those ten minutes than in the hour of dashboards that preceded them — and you’ll usually learn it far earlier than you otherwise would have.

Auditing your own review meeting against all four — Action, Results, Insights, Spirit — and seeing exactly which ones your current rhythm actually covers is one of the exercises in the masterclass I’m teaching on Tuesday, August 25, 4:00–6:00 PM CEST. Two hours, your own organization, a live diagnosis across the five leadership dimensions, and one concrete next move. Live Q&A two days later, both recorded, $295, full-refund guarantee. It stands entirely on its own.

Register for the masterclass →

— Marc