If Your Strategy Doesn’t Change Decisions, Is It Really a Strategy?

Each August, going back nearly two decades, I head out west with a group of friends for a backpacking and fly-fishing trip. Colorado, Wyoming, or Montana, depending on the year.

Planning is always interesting.

We all want the same things. Great fishing. Spectacular scenery. Reasonable hiking days. To avoid dying. To avoid grizzly bears. A cheeseburger and huckleberry ice cream after hiking out.

But when the maps come out, the confusion begins.

One route is shorter but brutally steep. Another is more scenic but makes the timing very tight. Another passes through a famous stretch of water, just a few miles off trail, almost close enough to justify it. The consensus falls apart quickly. And because everyone wants to be considerate of the others, the decision-making gets genuinely complicated. One person cares most about the fishing. Another wants the summit. Another is hoping to see wildlife. Another just wants to be comfortable out there.

We agree on almost everything and still struggle to make an actual decision.

I think about those planning sessions a lot when I watch leadership teams work through strategy.

Most teams feel genuinely aligned at the strategy level. They agree that the company should grow in new markets, create more customer value, simplify the portfolio, or move faster on innovation. Those are reasonable goals. They might even be exactly right.

But then a real decision shows up.

Which market do we enter? Which customer problem do we tackle first? Which product gets more investment? Which opportunity do we pass on?

That is when the alignment evaporates.

Sales pushes for near-term revenue. Product pushes for unmet customer needs. Engineering sees a chance to reuse something it already built. Operations worries about complexity. Finance wants the strongest return on paper. None of those perspectives is wrong. Each one is completely rational. The problem is that the strategy was never specific enough to help anyone choose between them.

Agreement is not the same as direction.

Strategic language sounds clear until you actually try to use it. “Grow in adjacent markets” seems concrete enough in a presentation. But adjacent based on what? Customer need? Technical fit? Profitability? Speed? Risk tolerance?

“Become more customer-focused” is hard to argue with. But does that mean improving the experience for customers you already have, pursuing segments that are underserved, or rethinking the product around a completely different job?

Broad language creates agreement precisely because different people can hear different things in it. That is not always a problem early on. It becomes one when the organization assumes broad agreement will automatically produce aligned decisions. It almost never does.

The real test is when good options compete.

A strategy is easy to support when no tradeoff is required. The test comes when the company has two or three genuinely attractive options and cannot pursue all of them.

Do you invest in the largest market or the one where you have the clearest path to winning? Do you improve the current product for existing customers or build something new for an adjacent segment? Do you chase the fastest revenue or the opportunity that better sets up the long-term business?

A useful strategy should make some options more attractive and others less so. If you can justify almost any option using the strategy, it is not providing direction. It is providing cover.

Sometimes the debate is not an execution problem.

When executives see teams going in circles on priorities, the instinct is to call it an execution problem. Sometimes that is true.

But sometimes the teams are not ignoring the strategy. They are interpreting it as best they can, each from their own vantage point. One group believes growth matters most. Another believes strategic fit matters most. A third believes customer evidence should decide. All of those can sound perfectly consistent with the same strategy document.

So decisions keep getting escalated. Meetings repeat. Priorities shift. The frustration at the top becomes: “We already agreed on the strategy. Why are we still relitigating every major decision?”

The answer is usually that the strategy created agreement about the destination but not enough clarity about the route.

A route requires actual choices.

Back to the trip. What we needed was not more inspiring conversation about the experience we were after. We needed to decide what actually mattered most when things conflicted.

Was the summit essential or just desirable? How much extra distance were we willing to accept for better fishing? Was post-trip ice cream a preference or a hard constraint? (Hard constraint. Obviously.) How much uncertainty around weather and bears were we willing to tolerate?

Once those questions had real answers, the route became a lot easier to choose.

Product strategy works the same way. Teams need to understand where the company will compete, which customers and problems matter most, and which tradeoffs are acceptable. But the part most strategies skip, and the part that matters more than almost anything else, is what the company will not do.

A strategy that only adds priorities is not much of a strategy. Most organizations already have too many. The point is to take some off the table.

One test worth trying.

Give several leaders and product teams the same list of opportunities and ask each group which one the strategy points toward, and why. Then compare the answers.

They do not need to agree perfectly. Strategy does not eliminate judgment. But they should be using similar criteria and recognizing the same tradeoffs. If they cannot, the strategy has not done its job yet.

Here is an even simpler version: ask your team which attractive opportunity the strategy would lead you to decline. If nobody can answer that, you may not have a strategy so much as a list of things you hope to accomplish.

A good strategy reduces the burden on leadership.

It should not prevent every disagreement. But it should dramatically reduce the number of decisions that get escalated simply because teams do not know what leadership actually intends. It should narrow the range of reasonable choices, make tradeoffs visible, and give different functions a more consistent basis for deciding.

In other words, it should change what people actually do.

My friends and I could have spent hours talking about the trip we wanted. We almost did. But until that conversation changed how we evaluated the actual routes in front of us, we did not have a plan. We had a vibe.

If your strategy is not changing which decisions people make, it might still be just a vibe.