Episode Details

The Strategy Arrived After The Decision

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Some strategies are instruments for deciding.

Others are instruments for explaining.

The difficulty is that both look exactly the same once they have been turned into slides.

The decision may have happened weeks earlier.

In a corridor.

Over lunch.

On a phone call nobody minuted.

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Then came the strategy. Forty-two pages of it.

Rigorous.

Polished.

Pointing exactly where it was always going to point.

The board approved it.

Nobody asked about the lunch.

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This episode examines Reverse Strategy — a strategy written to explain a decision already made, organised after the conclusion rather than before it.

Sometimes that is harmless.

Sometimes instinct is faster than analysis.

Sometimes the most important reasoning happened in a conversation that was never written down.

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The problem begins when the explanation is mistaken for the reasoning.

Because then the organisation examines the framework while the actual decision-making event remains entirely outside the frame.

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The portable question — worth carrying into every strategy presentation you will ever sit in:

"Which came first — the strategy or the decision it supports?"

The decision arrived from instinct. 

The strategy arrived from PowerPoint.

Field Note #054.