Strategy isn’t just about planning—it’s about preparing to meet the future, to shape it, and not just react to what comes our way. In conditions of complexity, the organizations that invest in thinking clearly are the ones that perform better, adapt faster, and lead with confidence.
Why engage in strategy making? Just as a sailor needs to chart a course in moving seas, so do people and organization leaders.
In this post, we’re going to look at what strategic thinking and strategy making brings to an organization. I’m also going to discuss why strategy making is a good investment of time, energy, focus, money, and leadership capital (your ROI).
Strategy-Making
Strategy is an intentional, designed process for determining what to focus on and how to achieve what you want. It accounts for the context you’re in at present and what you’re evolving into and the resources required to undertake what you’re looking to accomplish.
The process of creating a strategy and shaping the conditions and enablers to be successful in implementing that strategy is called strategic design. These enablers include developing tools and processes for feedback, learning and adaptation that enable a strategy to survive in living systems. After all, our organizations, communities, and markets are all part of dynamic ecosystems of activity and influence, so our strategy needs to be suited to these conditions.
Among the biggest criticisms of so many strategic plans is that they are static and don’t account for or enable change in complex environments.
The investment in strategy-making is an important one. Strategy making involves marshalling some of the most valued resources within your organization: time, focus, leadership capital, and money. The return on those investments are significant.
A strategy-making process asks: how will you set yourself up to win? By “win” I mean accomplish your mission, which includes creating an organization that can survive and thrive through complexity.
Roger Martin’s concept of playing to win emphasizes that strategy is not about playing it safe or simply surviving—it’s about making clear, integrated choices that position your organization to achieve meaningful success. In his framework (developed with A.G. Lafley of P&G), winning means defining what success looks like for your organization, where you will compete, and how you will win there. It’s a call to be bold, decisive, and intentional—strategy as a set of choices made in service of a defined goal, not just a plan or process.
Investment Returns on Strategy Making
The ROI for strategy is substantial and includes the following:
Clarity and Alignment
A good strategy provides clarity in your purpose, direction, and the conditions in which you operate. That means bringing to focus what you do, how you do (or intend to do) what you do, the resources you have (or need), and the steps required to get to where you want to go. This alignment, has tangible value. A McKinsey study found that aligned teams were 72% more likely to outperform competitors in profitability and performance.
Alignment also has the benefit of creating coherence in your organization. It ensures that people’s energy is focused in the same direction, reducing unnecessary duplication, miscommunication, and wasted efforts. It also better channels the resources within the organization.
Better Decisions, Faster
Strategy enables better prioritization under uncertainty and disruption. A strategic design process (different from just a strategic plan) fosters scenario planning, risk anticipation, and structured experimentation. What this does is enable leaders to respond to change quickly, because when change occurs, they have already envisioned ways to address the unexpected by training their mind and focus. It’s not about predicting the future, but anticipating possible outcomes and developing a way of thinking and acting that can sit within this range of possibilities.
This approach avoids expensive missteps, allows early course correction, and encourages timely pivots. It’s also a way to ensure that decisions and actions are aligned with a pathway, not just arbitrary.
Resource and People Engagement
A good strategy engages the resources within your organization – material, cognitive, and human talent. On the talent side, we know that contribution is one of the primary factors underlying job satisfaction and performance. People also stay when they know where the organization is going and how they can contribute meaningfully to something.
As a leader, your strategy will also help you better clarify what you have and what you need to get things done. Talent inventories or personal inventories can help, but understanding what people bring to an organization or situation and helping design the conditions that are best suited to making the most of those talents and helping people to thrive.
On the cost side, a good strategy builds internal culture and cohesion, leading to long-term cost savings in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity.
Increased Innovation Capacity
Innovation is creating something new that has value — its putting your ideas into practice. Innovation might be needed to adapt or survive (like public health units rapidly changing their procurement models or staffing deployments at the onset of a pandemic), as a means to gain an advantage over competitors, or simply meet an unmet need.
Strategic thinking opens space for intentional, not accidental, innovation. Without a strategy, innovation is scattershot (or non-existent) and unscalable. Strategic thinking supports leaders in identifying opportunities and creating viable pathways to making the most of them.
Resilience in the Face of Complexity
Strategy is about being the best at what you can, creating positive impact, and sustainable evolution. As we discussed in a previous post, strategy isn’t a plan. It’s not tactics, either. When undertaken as strategic design, a strategy enables organizations to thrive within living systems, rather than be subject to the whims of complexity.
We will continue to look at strategic design and its role in leadership for complex times in future posts. Stay tuned and thanks for reading.
If you’re in need of a strategy and want help in building it, let’s talk.
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