A calendar alert went off while I was grinding coffee on Monday. H2 kickoff, prereads due Thursday. I opened the folder to find the preread and there it was, the same file, still named brandstrategy_v7_FINAL_revised.
January's document. The one everybody in the room called urgent. It has been in review since March.
This happens at almost every company I have worked with, and the diagnosis is never what people think. Nobody is lazy. The strategist did the interviews. The deck is good. It is sitting in a state of permanent almost, collecting comments from people whose job is to have comments, and it will keep sitting there because nothing in the process has ever required it to stop.
A strategy document does not get finished by improving, it gets finished by someone deciding, and most companies have quietly removed the deciding step.
Review has replaced decision. That is the whole disease. Twelve people are asked for input, which is polite, and none of them are asked to approve, which is the actual work. Input has no end state. There is always another stakeholder, another quarter of data, another regional nuance worth one more slide. Meanwhile the market moves and the deck stays in draft, which feels safer than being wrong in public.
Three things fix it, and none of them are software.
One, date the decision before you start. Not the delivery date, the decision date. Put a human name next to it. If the person who signs off cannot be named on the first day, you are not writing a strategy, you are writing a document.
Two, make the artifact smaller than you want it to be. One page. Who we are for, what we do that others will not, what we are willing to give up. The seventy-slide version is not more rigorous. It is more places to hide.
Three, kill the word alignment. Alignment is what people say when they mean I would like the risk distributed. Salt & Straw does not have alignment on a new flavor, it has a person who tastes it and says yes. Patagonia did not align its way into telling customers not to buy the jacket.
Half of 2022 is gone. Whatever your January deck promised, the thing that shipped is your real strategy, and the file is just a record of what you wished were true.
Review has replaced decision.
Karaoke Thursday, the sticky-floored place in Southeast where the host calls everyone baby. I sing the same song, badly, all the way through, every time. No revisions, no second round of feedback, nobody circling back. It is the only project of mine that reliably ends. Truffles and Barnaby have not read the deck either, and they are doing fine.