When strategy never quite gets set

3 Feb

Founders often say they never actually wrote their strategy when they started their business. It just emerged as things developed. They had an idea, ran with it and made decisions quickly. At the time, that feels like momentum, and very few people want to slow things down by overthinking early on.

That early confidence usually comes from proximity. The same small group of people are having frequent conversations, making decisions together and carrying the context in their heads. In the room, direction feels obvious. It feels unnecessary to pin things down too tightly when everything is still moving and everyone feels aligned.

The problems tend to show up later. Once more people are involved and the pace increases, founders often realise the direction was never properly set. People are doing good work, but they are doing it from slightly different interpretations of what matters and where the business is heading.

It rarely ends with someone saying, “we don’t have a strategy”. More often, it starts with a quieter sense that things are not quite as clear as they should be. Decisions take longer, work needs revisiting, and alignment becomes something that has to be managed rather than something that exists naturally.

This pattern is not anecdotal. Research consistently shows that leaders overestimate how strategically aligned their organisations actually are. A large Harvard Business Review study found that perceived alignment at leadership level was two to three times higher than alignment experienced by employees. What feels clear at the centre often fragments much faster than leaders expect.

Importantly, this is not a problem confined to inexperienced or poorly run organisations. More recent research shows that misalignment remains persistent even among leaders who understand its importance. The issue is rarely intent or intelligence. It is structural. Shared conversation is repeatedly mistaken for shared direction.

What felt like shared understanding was shared context. Context works when everyone is close to it. It does not travel well once work starts moving through teams, roles and decisions made in the absence of the original thinkers.

As a business grows, strategy has to do a different job. It can no longer live only in the heads of the people who formed it. It needs to act as a reference point for people who were not part of the early conversations. It needs to hold choices in place so that others can act without having to guess or constantly check back.

This is where writing strategy down is often misunderstood. It is treated as documentation or bureaucracy, when in practice it is execution infrastructure. Making strategy explicit changes how people direct their effort. It reduces interpretation. It allows people to move faster without drifting.

There is strong evidence for this. Studies into strategic clarity show that when objectives, priorities and roles are clearly articulated, people focus their effort more effectively and performance improves. When clarity is missing, effort scatters even when motivation remains high. The difference is not commitment. It is direction.

The everyday mistake is assuming that clarity in conversation automatically becomes clarity in practice. It does not. Strategy does not need to be perfect at the start, but it does need to be explicit enough to survive beyond the people who first agreed it.

That is the difference between early momentum and durable direction.

Further reading