Last week I ran a session with a client team of nine and opened with the cheapest exercise I know. Everyone writes down, in one sentence, what the brand is for. No conferring, no looking at the deck, ninety seconds.
Six different answers from nine people. Two of the six were opposites.
The reflex in the room is always the same, and it came right on cue. Somebody said we have an alignment problem. We should socialize it better. We should do a roadshow, maybe a one-pager, maybe a Slack channel.
It is not an alignment problem.
If nobody can say the strategy out loud, you did not write a strategy, you wrote a document.
The difference is that a document accommodates and a decision excludes. Documents get written by consensus, which means every stakeholder gets a clause, which means by page four the brand is for discerning customers who value both innovation and heritage. Nine people read that and take home nine different meanings, because it was built to let them.
Three tests, and I use all of them before an offsite.
One, name what you are giving up. A strategy that costs nothing is a mood board. Patagonia telling people not to buy the jacket is a real decision with a real price attached, and you can repeat it from memory precisely because it hurts. If your positioning does not lose you a customer segment, a product line, or a revenue stream you would otherwise chase, it is not doing the work.
Two, it has to survive the hallway. Say it out loud with no slides to a colleague who was not in the process. If it takes context to make sense, it will never survive a busy quarter, because nobody carries context into a Tuesday deadline. Oatly does not require setup. Duolingo does not require setup.
Three, it has to settle an argument. Take a live disagreement your team is having right now about pricing, packaging, or a channel. Apply the strategy. If it does not point at an answer, it is decoration. This is the test that fails most often, and it fails quietly, because everyone nods and then goes back to deciding on instinct.
If nobody can say the strategy out loud, you did not write a strategy, you wrote a document.
Annual planning season starts this week for most of you. Before you build the deck, run the ninety-second exercise on your own team and count the distinct answers. It is a brutal number and it is the truest one you will see all quarter.
I walked to Powell's afterward to shake the session off and bought a book about bridges I will probably not finish. Nine people. Six answers. We fixed it by cutting, not adding, which is how it always goes.