The Strategy Process That Isn't

Ask most executive teams what AI transformation will mean for their organisation in three years, and they can name projects, pilots, budget lines. A jointly agreed, explicitly formulated position on where they are headed — that most do not have.

Strategy Is Choice, Not Planning

Roger Martin, one of the most influential strategic thinkers of our time, formulated an idea in Playing to Win that has stayed with me ever since:

Strategy is not a long planning document. Strategy is a set of interconnected, deliberately made choices that position an organisation to win.

That sounds simple. It is not. Choices commit. They close off alternatives. They make whoever made them accountable when the world develops differently than assumed. And that is precisely the pattern I encounter in practice again and again.

AI Transformation: The Decision Most Organisations Still Have to Make

In the next two to three years, most mid-sized companies in Switzerland will not be able to avoid taking a strategic position. Not on AI in general, but on what AI transformation means for their specific business model, their value chain, and their competitive position. What they consider an opportunity. What a threat. And how they allocate their limited resources accordingly.

A study by the FHNW School of Business with over 1,800 participants shows how far many executive teams still are from this point: only half of Swiss SMEs have a formulated digital strategy that sets the direction for the years ahead, and one in four never conducts a market analysis. Many management teams operate on the basis of implicit assumptions about the future, without ever having explicitly decided which ones they accept as the foundation of their strategic direction. Whoever postpones that decision still makes it, passively and without noticing.

A Document Is Not a Process

What is frequently called a strategy process is, in reality, a strategy project. An external consultancy is mandated, analyses are produced, presentations are held, offsites take place. None of that is worthless. But it does not replace what a genuine strategy process requires: the active, sometimes difficult engagement of the leadership team with a sequence of questions that no one can avoid.

Who are we as an organisation today, and how honest are we about that assessment? What assumptions do we hold about the world tomorrow, and do we genuinely share those assumptions? What do we consider an opportunity, what a threat, and why? Given those theses, what are our real strengths and weaknesses, not just the historical ones, but the strategically relevant ones? And how do we respond to what we see with the resources we actually have?

An external consultancy can prepare and facilitate these questions. Answering them is the job of the people in the room, together. What I observe is that this step is skipped or cut short, because it is uncomfortable, takes time, and produces no clean answers that fit on a slide. Instead, the external analysis delivers a coherent narrative that almost no one seriously challenges, because it sounds right, and because challenging it would imply questioning the decision to hire that consultancy in the first place.

I have encountered this in another form. A board was working to adopt an AI position paper, intended as a first, non-binding orientation for future decisions. It triggered extensive discussions about what a foundational document even means and what influence it should have on strategic choices. The question of which elements are genuinely strategic in nature and which belong to operational execution proved surprisingly difficult. Boundaries blur quickly, and shared understanding does not emerge by itself. Defining the playing field was demanding and took time. In the end, the formal result was substantially better than the first draft. More importantly, the board had, for the first time, a shared picture of what should be defined at the strategic level in the context of AI and what should be left to implementation. That is strategy work. It demands exactly that kind of precision, even when no one enjoys it.

Whoever Decides Is Accountable. Whoever Analyses Is Not.

Kahneman and Tversky showed in their Prospect Theory that people weight losses significantly more heavily than equivalent gains. The potential damage from a courageous wrong decision is systematically experienced as larger than the slow-burning damage of inaction.

In the context of strategy processes, this means: whoever decides is exposed. If the decision proves wrong, accountability is clearly assigned. Whoever commissions a project that produces analyses delegates that accountability. If the situation does not improve, there are many places where the blame can land: the external environment, the quality of execution, the missing resources.

I observe this in very experienced leaders I respect. It is a structural pattern, not an individual failure.

What I encounter is a form of procrastination that does not feel like procrastination. There is no moment where anyone says: I do not want to decide this. What happens instead is that a strategy offsite gets scheduled, analyses follow, alignment rounds emerge, and eventually the time has passed without a real decision having been made. Parkinson's Law applies here too: work expands to fill the time available for it.

What would a startup do differently, one where the money might run out every month? Very likely decide faster. Not because its leaders are braver, but because the consequences of indecision are more immediately felt. Established companies do not have that pressure, or they have lost sight of it. That changes the dynamics of decision-making fundamentally.

Terms Are Not Substance. Theses Are Not Facts.

In an earlier article, I described how leadership teams use shared terms while holding very different ideas about what those terms actually mean: four people, one concept, four different contents (German). In a strategic context, that is especially consequential. It means that even a jointly agreed strategy is being interpreted in different directions by those who agreed to it.

Nowhere is this more visible than with AI transformation. Barely an executive team or board in Switzerland today has a formulated AI strategy, an explicitly agreed, collectively held position on what AI will mean for their organisation in three or five years. There are pilots, projects, budget lines, sometimes a strategy offsite. Whether those activities rest on a shared strategic decision is usually unclear.

This connects directly to what I described in an earlier piece as the core problem of many leadership systems: they are structurally built for decisions based on facts, not for decisions based on theses about an uncertain future. Strategic work is, in large part, exactly that: an informed bet on a future that is not yet visible.

Where Is the Bottleneck, and in Which Horizon?

McKinsey's Three Horizons framework was designed to help organisations manage growth and innovation across different time horizons. What I observe in practice is that it is often used to categorise projects, not to answer the actually decisive question: where is the bottleneck that prevents the organisation from reaching that horizon at all?

In the first horizon, the core business, the bottleneck is usually operational. Capacity, process quality, leadership clarity. That can be measured and addressed. In the second horizon, expansion into adjacent areas, the bottleneck is frequently organisational: who owns this? What resources are being pulled from operations, and who decides when horizon one and horizon two come into conflict? In the third horizon, the bottleneck is often cognitive and cultural: the capacity to imagine a fundamentally different future, one that lies outside the organisation's current logic. I have written before about how optimising the existing business and genuine strategic renewal are two fundamentally different things.

A strategy process that does not ask the bottleneck question per horizon allocates resources to areas of activity without knowing what is actually limiting progress. That produces movement, sometimes a great deal of movement, but no impact.

What Distinguishes a Real Strategy Process from a Project

The first question a management team should ask is rarely asked explicitly: do we want a genuine strategy development process, or do we want a project roadmap? The distinction sounds academic, but it is not, especially when the strategy work is to be delegated. Without a clear mandate and shared understanding at board or executive level, no effective strategy work can take place. Inefficiency, conflict, frustration, and compromise outcomes are pre-programmed.

A real process requires a sequence of decisions, not a sequence of analyses. First, agreement on the strategic starting position, not the official version, but the honest one. Then work on shared theses about the future: how do we assess the relevant environmental factors? Technology, competition, regulation, society? This is the step I most frequently see cut short. The world in which a company will operate in five years is not a given, it is an assumption. Different assumptions lead to fundamentally different strategies. Whoever does not make those assumptions explicit is deciding on the basis of different pictures of the future, without knowing it.

Then the decision on what is seen as an opportunity and what as a threat. Then honest engagement with the organisation's real strengths and weaknesses in light of those theses. And finally the decision on how to respond to what you see with limited resources, with clear reasoning, clear resource allocation, clear accountability.

That is strategy in Roger Martin's sense. Not a vision, not a goal, but a bet. A consciously made, explicitly reasoned bet.

Five Diagnostic Questions for Your Leadership Team

I use these questions in my work with leadership teams as a reference point. Not as a checklist to be ticked off, but as a litmus test for whether real decisions were made or only formulations produced:

1. Have we agreed on a shared description of our strategic starting position, not the official version, but the honest one?

If this question creates discomfort in the room, that is a signal. The official version almost always exists. The honest version is rarely spoken aloud.

2. Have we formulated explicit, jointly held theses about how we assess the relevant environmental factors over the next three to five years?

Technology, competition, regulation, society. If the answers around the table diverge, that is not a communication problem. The shared thesis is missing.

3. Have we decided what we consider an opportunity and what a threat, and can we give reasons for why?

A list of opportunities and risks is not a decision. Only when the group agrees on a shared assessment and can articulate the reasoning is a strategic foundation in place.

4. Have we honestly assessed, against those theses, what our real strengths are and where we are structurally weak today?

Not the historical strengths, the strategically relevant ones. What has made us successful so far is not automatically what will carry us in the anticipated future.

5. Have we decided how we will respond to what we see with limited resources, and who is responsible for doing so?

Without clear resource allocation and named accountability, a strategy is wishful thinking. The decision about what not to do is often the harder one.

If any of these questions is answered with well, more or less, it is worth looking more closely. More or less is usually the polite version of no.

These five questions are not only relevant for the management team itself. Whoever prepares, accompanies, or owns strategic processes internally, as a staff function, head of department, or chief of staff, often sees the pattern more clearly than the leadership level does: you see where surface-level agreement ends. You know which topics keep being postponed. And you carry the weight of facilitating a process whose foundations are not yet clear. If you are in that role and looking for a framework that structures the conversation before it becomes about content, that is precisely where my work begins.

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Seeing Bottlenecks Before the Process Begins

What causes a strategy process to fail often lies not in the content, but in what was not clarified beforehand. Who we really are as an organisation. What we can imagine for the future and what still lies outside the boundaries of our thinking. Where the actual bottleneck is that blocks a first meaningful step. And what dynamics in the leadership team cause the same topics to be postponed again and again. These are the questions I ask before engaging with a leadership team on strategy content.

If you are in the middle of a strategy development or find that your management team or board keeps getting stuck at the same points, it is worth not skipping this step. On the strategy page, you will find how I accompany strategy processes in SMEs.

For the diagnostic work itself, I use Ambiflow. It's not a strategy it's a leadership framework that makes visible what is blocking a process before it becomes about content, and that also provides orientation during implementation: the question of the next bottleneck resurfaces on the path from strategy to impact again and again. The principles underpinning Ambiflow offer a first look.

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Bernhard Nitz is the founder of transformind GmbH and works with leadership teams in SMEs and corporations across the DACH region when transformations are at risk of failing under their own complexity.