Stop reaching for strategy. It's clarity you're after.

As a leader for 20+ years, I used to believe my job was to create, communicate, and drive the execution of a strategy. So I built one. Several, in fact - refreshed annually, captured in decks, presented with conviction at offsites that everyone agreed had gone well. We would leave the room energised, aligned, clear. And then, within a few weeks, the energy would quietly leak away and we would be back to where we started: busy, well-intentioned, but pulling in subtly different directions.

For years I diagnosed this as a strategy problem. The plan wasn’t sharp enough, the priorities weren’t ranked properly, we hadn’t cascaded it well. So I’d reach for more strategy. A better framework. A tighter deck. Another offsite. It rarely changed much, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand why.

The problem was never the strategy. It was that I had never been able to say, in one honest sentence, what we were actually trying to achieve - the true impact we should be having on our target customers. And because I couldn’t communicate this, neither could anyone else.

Here is the part I’m least comfortable admitting: I didn’t just struggle with the lack of clarity. I manufactured it. The twenty-page plan was easier to produce than the one sentence, because the one sentence would have forced me to choose. To say this matters more than that. To name the customer we weren’t for, the opportunity we’d walk past, the thing we’d stop doing. Length felt like rigour. It was actually the opposite - an elaborate way of keeping every option open and avoiding the moment of commitment. I mistook the volume of the plan for the clarity of the intent, and I handed that confusion straight to my teams.

And they felt it long before I did. I’d watch good people hesitate over decisions that should have been obvious, escalate things they were perfectly capable of judging, produce work that was technically correct yet somehow beside the point. I used to read that as a capability problem. It wasn’t. They were doing exactly what I’d set them up to do: executing the steps without being able to see or convey the goal - because I’d given them a plan instead of clarity. When you can’t see what you’re aiming at, you optimise for the instruction in front of you. They were being faithful to my deck. The deck was the problem.

The exercise that exposed the gap

What finally shifted it for me wasn’t a better strategy process. It was an uncomfortable exercise. I asked my leadership team, separately, to write down in a single sentence what we were really trying to accomplish, and what we were choosing not to chase in order to get there. I told myself it would be a quick confirmation of alignment.

The answers didn’t line up. Not even close. People I’d worked alongside for years, who sat through every one of those offsites, held genuinely different beliefs about what we were for. And the most sobering thing was that none of them were wrong - they had simply each filled the silence I’d left with their own reasonable interpretation. The strategy had been detailed. The clarity underneath it had been missing the whole time, and I was the one who’d left the gap.

Strategy and clarity are not the same thing

I’ve come to think of it as a simple ordering that I had backwards for years. Strategy is how you intend to win - the choices, the bets, the route. Clarity is what sits atop and underneath it: why you exist, what impact you have (regardless of the product or vertical), what matters most right now, what success actually looks like, and what you are deliberately not doing. You cannot sensibly choose a route before you’re honest about the destination. I’d been agonising over the route while the destination stayed politely undefined.

Clarity is harder because it subtracts

What I notice now is that clarity is the harder of the two precisely because it subtracts. A strategy can always add - another initiative, another pillar, another workstream. Addition is easy. Clarity, on the other hand, is difficult - because it removes. It makes you name the priority that beats the others and live with what that costs. And it demands a kind of honesty I used to find ways around: honesty about what was actually working, about what we were really for, about the distance between the story I told the company and the truth I knew on the ground.

Hold clarity steady. Let tactics flex.

I also got the stability backwards. I’d hold the strategy rigid and let the purpose stay vague - which is the most fragile arrangement there is. It should be the other way round. Clarity is the thing you hold steady; tactics are meant to flex. When the clarity is firm, changing tactics feels like adapting. When it’s absent, every change feels like drift, and people quietly stop believing anyone is steering. For a while, in my company, no one believed it. Fairly.

I won’t pretend I’ve fully solved this. But I’ve stopped reaching for strategy when what’s missing is clarity, and I’ve learned to treat the discomfort of the one-sentence exercise as the signal that I’m finally doing the real work rather than avoiding it.

If your team feels busy and stuck at the same time, I’d gently suggest the problem isn’t your plan. It’s the sentence that precedes it that no one has been able to write. I know, because for a long time the person avoiding it was me.