Strategy is something you should use every day — and keep refining all the time.
They told you strategy is about long-term planning. They told you to create 3-5 year roadmaps. They lied.
When CEOs, startup founders, or business owners come to me for strategy consulting, they often ask for a ‘map.’
“I need a terrain map and a route to help me navigate my business through it,” one of them said.
“I don’t have a map,” I said, “but I can give you a compass. It’s not accurate, but it’ll do the job.”
Birdhouses, airports, and business strategy
Berlin Brandenburg Airport has become a synonym for project management failure. Construction began in 2006, with the opening planned for 2011 and a budget of €2 billion. In reality, the airport opened its doors only in 2020 — nine years late and at 3.5 times the original cost.
Experts say the project team showed remarkable discipline in making mistakes across every aspect of the work. Planning, of course, was the standout failure.
The project team was working in stable conditions, but still failed to account for all possible details during the planning phase. For example, once the concrete work was completed, they realized they had forgotten to include cable ducts in the walls.
“Failing to plan is planning to fail”—that’s what we hear since childhood.
Planning and building an airport is a very complex task — and as we’ve seen, not everyone can pull it off. But there’s something that makes strategy an even harder challenge.
The three fundamental aspects of planning are:
1. The current situation
2. Your goal
3. Steps to achieve the goal
When you build a birdhouse, a barn, or an airport, the current situation and your goal don’t change while you’re planning and building.
That’s a kind of bliss that strategic planning can only dream of. The current situation will change. Your goal will evolve.
Moreover, in real strategy work, your own actions shape the situation more than external forces ever could.
Strategy is about building something you don’t fully understand, in a world you don’t fully grasp — one that’s constantly in motion.
Traditional project management tools are as useful here as an axe in eye surgery. You need another approach.
Strategy as a set of principles
Traditional planning sees the process in two neat phases:
1. Planning — mostly thinking, very little doing
2. Doing — mostly doing, not much thinking
That means you do the lion’s share of decision-making in the first phase.
But if your business isn’t a lemonade stand, your managers make hundreds of decisions every day. And even if your strategy is a 200-page slide deck, they won’t find all the answers to their everyday questions there.
You can’t make all decisions in advance.
But you can give them a set of Central Principles to help them navigate their daily decisions.
The Central Principles of your strategy should clearly spell out things like:
- Which customers are your priority — and why
- Which of their needs you focus on — and why
- What kind of customer value you create for them
- Which assets and processes you need to develop
- What kind of culture you need to support that
- What technologies will be required — and for what purpose
And so on.
The final list can get quite long — but each executive will only need the part that’s relevant to their role.
Every day, when they need to make a decision, they’ll refer to these principles.
A team, then, isn’t an orchestra playing from a fixed score — it’s a jazz band, working from a central theme and the rules of harmony. Jazz musicians don’t have sheet music telling them exactly when to play each note. But they share principles—the key signature, the basic chord progression, the rhythm.
And strategy isn’t a “fixed score”, a map. It’s a compass. And this compass, alas, is inaccurate.
Inaccurate compass
The Central Principles of your strategy aren’t Moses’ tablets, carved in stone once and for all. You need to revise, fine-tune, and improve them — again and again.
It happens not only because your “current situation” is changing but because your strategic assumptions are always incorrect.
Strategy is about doing what you’ve never done before. That means the course you’ve chosen won’t be 100% right.Even if you don’t pivot, you’ll still need to adjust your direction along the way.
You need to build a feedback loop to see whether your central principles are actually working. And if they’re not, you’ll need to adjust them.
Strategy is a short-term tool. It’s not a map, because you can’t map something that keeps changing.
Strategy is about finding your way through a maze that keeps changing as you walk.
That’s why so few ever make it out.
Svyatoslav Biryulin
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If you want to dive deeper into strategic thinking — and you’re not afraid to face its paradoxes and provocations — read my book Red and Yellow Strategies: Flip Your Strategic Thinking and Overcome Short-termism.
Visit my website.
I write about cognitive biases in business strategy, mental models for strategic decision making, and paradoxes in business strategy. Subscribe to get new articles delivered straight to your inbox. Prefer RSS? Subscribe here → https://sbiryulin.com/feed