The 3 Key Deliverables Of A Strategy Process

A strategy process must deliver more than a sound strategy.

There are three key things that a strategy process must deliver to be judged excellent.

Imagine yourself presenting your strategy to the board. The presentation goes well. The hard to please board members nod approvingly, and challenge you at the right places with insightful questions. After an intense, but overall encouraging session, everyone is pleased. The board approves and supports the strategy.

How do we get to this point?

There are three elements:

1. The strategy

2. The document

3. The presentation

You need all three to be excellent.

Key output #1: The strategy itself

Clearly, you’re at a loss if the underlying strategy itself is horrible.

No amount of lipstick can transform a bad strategy into a good one. The foundations simply must make sense. The inner logic of the strategy has to be sound.

However, substance is clearly not enough.

If you can’t convince the board, you’ve actually destroyed value.

Key output #2: the document

An insane amount of strategy work suffers because of bad documents.

The strategy document must convincingly argue for a choice. It must be easy to understand. And simple to see how one arrives at the conclusion by the supporting arguments. It’s not about slides (in fact I don’t like powerpoint) or document length. It’s about logic, coherence, structure and conciseness. It’s about minimising the friction for the reader. Without sacrificing nuance and substance.

Turns out writing a good strategy document is hard and frustrating.

So most of the time, strategy documents are mediocre or worse. They tend to be frustrating to read. Usually, it’s hard to connect the dots. And even more frustrating, it fails to address key questions and important nuance. Some times, it’s because the underlying strategy is mediocre. Other times, it’s a communication craftsmanship issue. But often, it’s a prioritisation issue.

As a result, countless meetings are wasted discussing the wrong things.

Key output #3 the presentation

The last stretch.

This part is easy if you have done step 1 and 2, and you just to one thing: Practice. Ideally with a red-team. Anticipate hard questions. Practice the entire thing 3-10 times - ideally by recording yourself. That’s how you move from an average to top 5 % performance.

Presentation is all about preparation.

It’s not enough to simply get the strategy right.

Quite often, I see managers stumble at the finish line due to a bad document accompanied by an ineffective presentation.

A well crafted strategy process needs to deliver excellence across all three dimensions:

• the substance

• the document

• the final presentation.

Because all three are needed to convince the board.