I continue to see clients investing in traditional strategy frameworks – balanced scorecards, strategy maps, 5 forces, etc. These are all good tools for working through how the company can grow and serve its clients. Sadly, the development process continues to be choked down to an elite corps – “a few good men (and maybe some women)” at very senior levels in the organization. This handful of people, by merit of going through the working processes, gains a clear understanding of what it’s all about. When it comes time to announce it (drum roll please…) at best we get some fancy communications, maybe some pretty pictures, but there is no effective way to communicate the experience of creating the strategy. And so it becomes the “flavor of the month/year” and most people simply continue on with their day to day activities, not really caring one way or the other especially after the initial flurry of noise about it. And then clients say “why didn’t it work”?

In today’s work environment it is absolutely possible to engage more people in the process of defining strategy, and not doing so means strategic success continues to be painfully throttled in most organizations. Through the creation process, people learn about how to make different decisions based on the strategic direction. They learn what their colleagues are weighing and considering in their decision making, and through the process, they change their approach to work. It is this change that carries through to embedding the strategy in the culture.

Without this vital step, all the lovely posters and catchphrases and marketing in the world aren’t going to get a strategy to stick.  The problem comes when the change is limited to a very small group of people very high up in the organization.

Even if you can’t break through the concept of strategy as belong to a privileged few, think about ways that help more people to use it in their day to day decision making. Otherwise, it is a lot of time and money spent for just a very few people in the company to get “strategically aligned”.