Strategy as a habit not an event

For a big chunk of my career I worked as an agency strategist. The shape of that work was clean: come into a business, run the workshops, gather the research, find the insights, write the deck. Present it, refine it, hand it over. Move to the next brief. Most weeks ended with something tangible delivered.

For another part of my career I worked client-side. As a Brand Director and a Managing Director, in businesses where the strategic work never quite stopped because the business never quite stopped. Decisions were made every day that needed strategic logic running through them. Who to hire. Which supplier to back. How to brief a product launch. What to say to a sceptical buyer. How to read a sudden category shift. Most of those decisions never made it into a strategy document. They just happened. Quickly. With or without coherent thinking sitting behind them.

The paradox I came to recognise, having lived both sides of it, is roughly this: the people doing the strategy don't usually have to live with it. And the people living with it don't usually have time to do it. Strategy and doing run on different clocks, in different rooms. They meet at the presentation. Then they part again.

This isn't a critique of either side. The agency work is real work and it produces real value that can often be transformational. A well run foundation project gets the senior team in a room, forces decisions that had been avoided, and creates a shared artefact the business can return to. The doing side is real work too, and the people doing it are usually impressive and occasionally inspired. The problem isn't on either side. It's in the gap between them.

The gap is structural. Strategy is bought and sold as a project. A burst of activity, an artefact, a brief period of altitude. The work that follows is the running of the business, which is something else entirely: faster, more reactive, made up of countless small decisions that rarely get held against the agreed plan. Both sides nod at each other from a distance. Each assumes the other is doing what it needs to do.

What this produces, on the doing side, is something most operators will recognise. There's a plan somewhere. You're sort of trying to follow it. But the day to day decisions don't really seem to flow from it and the gap between the documented strategy and the actual operating reality starts to widen, slowly, every week. Eighteen months later, when the gap is wide enough to notice, the business commissions another project to reconcile the two. Which, well, doesn't really reconcile them. It just produces a new document.

Founders feel this. MDs feel this. Marketing directors feel it acutely, because they're often the ones being asked why the brand work hasn't translated into the operational layer. It rarely gets named as a structural problem, because it doesn't look like one. It looks like the team is being a bit slow to execute, or the strategy was a bit off, or the market changed faster than expected. Which it always does.

There's a different way to think about strategy and it's one we already understand intuitively in other domains.

We don't think of fitness as a project. We don't think of learning a language as a project. We don't think of running a creative practice as something that happens in eight week sprints once every two years. We think of all these things as practices: sustained, regular, accountable, with cycles of intensity and rest but no fundamental beginning or end. Strategy works the same way. The thinking is continuous, the priorities shift, the plan adapts to what's actually happening and the small decisions get held to the bigger direction because someone is paying attention.

This is what I've come to think strategy work actually is. It's why I built Become around a different shape of engagement. Not bigger projects. Not better decks. A sustained practice. Quarterly rhythm, monthly working sessions, the strategic perspective in the room every month rather than every year or so. Someone whose job it is to keep the plan alive, to attend to the smaller decisions before they add up and drift, to bring bigger thinking when the moment calls for it. 

The deck still gets made when defining foundational strategy requires one. It has real value as a communication artefact, and as a way of aligning a team behind a shared direction. But the deck isn't the deliverable. The deliverable is a business that's actually running on its strategy, in the small decisions as well as the big ones, twelve months and eighteen months and three years after the original work was done.

If that sounds like it's borrowed from coaching, that's because it has been. The closest analogy for good strategic stewardship isn't management consulting. It's the long term relationship between a coach and the person they're coaching. Sustained attention. Accountability. Adjustment as life changes. Honest conversation when something needs to be said. Strategy is meant to be lived, not laminated and stuck on a shelf.

This is the gap I think about most. The space between the people doing the thinking and the people doing the doing. Closing it doesn't mean fewer decks, or shorter projects, or more workshops. It means changing the shape of the relationship between strategic thinking and operational reality. Weaving the two together until the strategy isn't something the business has, but something the business does.