Good strategy takes weeks

Strategy is not a brainstorm, an offsite, or a deck full of ideas. It is a researched, written, and pressure-tested set of choices about how the company will reach its destination. Vision gives you the destination. Strategy gives you the current best route. Good strategy work rarely comes out of one afternoon.

One of the most common mistakes I see in companies is that they confuse strategy with ambition.

They decide they want to grow. They decide they want to enter a market. They decide they want to become AI-enabled. They decide they want to improve retention, launch internationally, move upmarket, or win in enterprise.

All of that may be sensible. None of it is strategy yet.

Richard Rumelt makes this distinction very clearly in McKinsey Quarterly: strategy is not a financial goal or a wish list. It is an approach to dealing with a difficult challenge, and it only becomes real when actions and policies are coherent enough to avoid pulling in too many conflicting directions at once.

That is why I say good strategy takes weeks.

Not because the process needs to be slow for the sake of it. Because it needs enough time to become true.

Vision is the destination. Strategy is the route.

This distinction gets muddled constantly.

Vision answers the big questions:

• Where are we going?
• Why does that matter?

Strategy answers a different question:

• How are we currently going to get there?

McKinsey's work on organisational health is useful here because it treats strategic clarity as a practical operating requirement, not an abstract virtue. Healthy organisations, it argues, translate vision and strategy into actionable and measurable objectives that are clearly articulated and shared at all levels. Gallup's 2025 workplace data shows why this matters so much in practice: only 46% of employees clearly knew what was expected of them in 2024, down from 56% in 2020.

That is the cost of muddle.

If the destination is vague, teams drift. If the route is vague, teams thrash. If both are vague, the company becomes busy without becoming coherent.

“Vision is the destination. Strategy is the current best route.”

Most companies do not do strategy. They do opinions in a room.

That sounds harsher than I mean it to, but it is often true.

A few people get together. They discuss trends. They say what feels important. They react to competitors. They produce a document full of initiatives.

Then everyone behaves as though strategy has happened.

Usually, what has happened is something else: a collection of perspectives has been assembled before the underlying challenge has been properly understood.

Rumelt's point is again very helpful here. Good strategy starts with diagnosing the challenge and identifying its crux. It is not a slogan or a shopping list. It is a set of coherent choices designed to deal with what is actually hard. HBR's more recent writing on strategy lands in much the same place: strategy is best understood as the set of choices you will use to make decisions, not a broad aspiration that sounds sensible but governs nothing.

That is why good strategy work needs time.

Not endless time. But enough time to move past instinct, status, and first-thought enthusiasm.

“Most companies do not do strategy. They do opinions in a room.”

Good strategy needs evidence, not just taste

The reason it takes weeks is that real strategy work has inputs.

You need customer understanding. You need market truth. You need commercial logic. You need internal constraints. You need to understand where the business is genuinely strong, where it is weak, and where it is flattering itself.

That means interviews, data, history, trade-offs, financial implications, operational realities, and often a surprising amount of writing. McKinsey's 2025 article on AI and strategy is useful here because it describes AI as helpful across several roles in strategy work — researcher, interpreter, thought partner, simulator, and communicator — but it is explicit that human judgement remains essential to crafting the strategic vision. In other words, you can accelerate the work, but you cannot skip the work.

That is also why I prefer written strategy thinking so strongly. The point is not to create a beautiful deck. The point is to force the company to define the challenge, state the route, name the assumptions, and make the trade-offs visible enough to be argued with intelligently.

Strategy is a set of choices, which means trade-offs are not optional

A strategy that does not force trade-offs is usually not a strategy.

It is an aspiration with a larger vocabulary.

HBR's writing on strategic trade-offs makes the point cleanly: strategy is about choosing where to focus, and at the strategic level, even choosing the slightly better option can create tremendous value while choosing the slightly worse one can have far-reaching consequences. Rumelt says something similar from another angle: you create coherence by not pursuing too many conflicting initiatives at once.

This is why a lot of strategy work feels uncomfortable when it is real.

Because it forces the company to say:

• Not that market, this one
• Not that customer first, this one
• Not those three priorities, these two
• Not now, later
• Not because it looks interesting, because it solves the actual challenge

That is why it cannot be rushed.

The trade-offs need enough pressure that the weak route collapses before the business commits to it.

“A strategy that does not force trade-offs is usually not a strategy.”

Strategy should be researched deeply and then held more lightly than vision

This is another place where companies get confused.

They are often too loose about vision and too rigid about strategy.

It should be the reverse.

The destination needs enough stability that people can orient around it. The route needs enough flexibility that it can adapt when the facts change. McKinsey's 2025 strategy article argues that AI can make strategy teams more rigorous and faster, but still underlines that judgement is needed to determine the route. HBR's classic The Office of Strategy Management makes the governance point neatly: emerging ideas should be brought into quarterly and annual strategy reviews so the best ones can be adopted and embedded into enterprise strategy.

That is exactly the posture I would recommend.

Be solid on vision. Be more flexible on strategy.

Research the route hard. Then review it quarterly. And if the evidence changes, change the route.

That is not inconsistency. That is intelligence.

AI should compress the cycle, not lower the standard

This matters even more now because AI can make weak strategy look more polished than it is.

You can generate frameworks faster. You can summarise markets faster. You can produce options faster. You can write slides faster.

What you cannot do is escape the need for judgement.

McKinsey's 2025 article is careful on this point: AI can bring greater rigour and speed to strategy development, but human judgement remains essential to crafting the strategic vision and deciding how to realise it. HBR's March 2026 piece on LLMs and strategic advice makes the risk clearer from the other side: researchers found that leading LLMs displayed clear biases and often produced shallow, trend-following recommendations rather than genuinely differentiated strategy.

So yes, AI should change the cadence.

It should help the strategy team learn faster, compare scenarios faster, and pressure-test assumptions faster.

But it should not tempt leaders into replacing strategy with accelerated pattern-matching.

That is not strategy. That is fast conformity.

“AI should compress the cycle, not lower the standard.”

Good strategy work has a shape

If I were describing the minimum shape of serious strategy work, it would look like this.

First, get painfully clear on the destination. Second, diagnose the challenge honestly. Third, gather customer, market, competitive, commercial, and internal evidence. Fourth, write down the realistic strategic routes. Fifth, pressure-test the trade-offs. Sixth, choose. Seventh, communicate the route clearly enough that the rest of the company can act on it. Then, review it properly each quarter.

McKinsey's organisational-health work says healthy companies translate direction into measurable objectives shared at all levels. HBR's strategy-management work says the best strategy systems create formal quarterly review points so the route can evolve. Those two things fit together well: strategy should be researched deeply enough to deserve commitment, then revisited regularly enough to deserve trust.

That is how you avoid the two most common errors:

• Strategy that changes every week because it was never strong enough to hold
• Strategy that never changes because leadership is mistaking stubbornness for conviction

A simple test

If you want to know whether a company really has a strategy, ask a few blunt questions.

• Can it explain the challenge clearly?
• Can it explain what it is deliberately not doing?
• Can it explain why this route is better than the obvious alternatives?
• Can employees use it to make micro-decisions without asking for permission every hour?
• Can the company update the route when evidence changes without sounding like it has lost its mind?

If the answer is no, the business may still have ambition. It may still have energy. It may still have a lot of intelligent people.

It probably does not yet have a strategy strong enough to carry them.

That is why good strategy takes weeks.

Because real strategy is not what happens when a room has opinions.

It is what remains after the challenge has been understood, the options have been tested, the trade-offs have been faced, and the company has chosen a route coherent enough to deserve execution.

“Good strategy is not a slogan or a shopping list. It is a coherent response to a difficult challenge.”