The 5-Step Guide to Building a Strategy No One Follows
Because nothing says ‘execution’ like 12 priorities and zero ownership.
Every January, executive teams emerge from off-sites with a gleam in their eye and a fresh new deck in their inbox.
This year’s strategy?
Bold.
Transformative.
Loaded with priorities.
And — statistically speaking — doomed.
Research shows that 60–90% of strategies fail.
95% of employees don’t understand the company’s strategy at all.
That’s not a messaging problem. That’s a design flaw.
Because most strategic plans are built not to be executed — but to be approved.
They’re too broad, too polite, and too divorced from reality to be useful.
This is the (accidental) 5-step process most teams / organizations / individuals follow to ensure that strategy dies a quiet, dignified death.
Let’s walk through it.
🧠 Step 1: Set Every Goal Imaginable
(Also known as: “Boil the ocean.”)
Real strategy is about choosing what matters most.
Fake strategy is about trying to matter to everyone.
So you end up with a slide like:
“We will simultaneously optimize operations, elevate patient experience, drive top-line growth, expand service lines, innovate the tech stack, and develop leaders across the enterprise.”
That’s not a strategy. That’s a manifesto with a deadline problem.
In Playing to Win, strategy starts with hard, narrow choices:
Where will you compete?
How will you win?
If your strategy doesn’t eliminate 90% of what you could do, it’s not a strategy.
It’s an inspirational to-do list.
🧠 Step 2: Add 8–12 Strategic Pillars
(“If it fits on one slide, we didn’t try hard enough.”)
If your strategy includes a dozen pillars, congratulations — you’ve created a brochure.
As The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) points out,
“If you try to accomplish too many goals, you’ll accomplish none.”
Real focus feels aggressive. It says, “We’re doing this — and we’re not doing that.”
The more pillars you add, the more you signal that nothing will be prioritized. Because priorities that don’t come with tradeoffs are just words in bold font.
🧠 Step 3: Make No Hard Tradeoffs
(“Let’s not upset anyone during this process.”)
Great strategy creates discomfort.
It says, “We’re killing this program,” or “We’re exiting this market,” or “We’re putting 80% of our resources here — and 0% there.”
What do most orgs do instead?
“We’ll find balance.”
“We’ll pursue both innovation and operational excellence.”
“We’ll transform and stabilize simultaneously.”
Translation: We made no choices because someone in the room might cry.
🧠 Step 4: Skip the Execution Plan
(“Let’s circle back in Q3.”)
Real execution means:
Naming who owns what
Creating lead + lag measures
Establishing a cadence of accountability
Most plans include none of that. Instead, you get a final slide that says something like:
“Success will be measured over time using a blended scorecard framework.”
Which means: no one owns anything, and we’ll revisit this the next time the consultant comes back.
🧠 Step 5: Use Metrics No One Understands
(“Let’s track what’s easy — or nothing at all.”)
Here’s how you know your strategy is in trouble:
It’s full of soft metrics ("increase visibility")
It avoids real accountability ("enhance engagement")
Or it’s loaded with lagging outcomes that can’t drive action
If your team can’t tell whether they’re winning or losing this week, they’re already losing.
4DX makes this painfully clear:
You need a visible scoreboard that drives behavior — not just a quarterly dashboard that confirms suspicion.
🔍 The Strategic Gut Check
Ask yourself (and your team):
✅ Have we chosen where we’ll compete — and where we won’t?
✅ Do we have no more than 1–2 wildly important goals?
✅ Did we make tradeoffs that would make someone mildly angry?
✅ Does everyone know who owns what — and by when?
✅ Could someone explain the strategy to a 12 year old while riding in an elevator?
If not, then respectfully:
You don’t have a strategy.
You have a hallucination with bullet points.
✍️ Final Thought
Great strategy is uncomfortable.
It makes decisions.
It creates tension.
It costs something.
But it also creates clarity — and clarity scales.
So the next time you sit down to “build the plan,” maybe skip the Panera cookies and PowerPoint gradients…
…and ask the one question that actually matters:
What are we willing to give up — to actually win?