It's easy to assume strategy fails because the plan was wrong. In my experience, it fails much earlier - when people lose confidence that there's a strategy at all.
At first it looks like collaboration. More meetings. More conversations. Plenty of ideas. But there are signs belief is slipping: the same debates looping every week, priorities that get written down but never treated as final, decisions that keep getting revisited. Progress looks busy on the surface, but underneath nothing really moves.
That's when behaviours shift. People wait to be told what to do. Nobody wants to take the lead. Consensus becomes the default. Confidence erodes, alignment fades, and momentum stalls.
The cost isn't just organisational. It's personal. High-agency people start to hesitate. Energy drops. Trust in leadership thins out. Even the most capable teams second-guess themselves when they don't believe in the direction.
Sometimes that's deliberate. In fragile moments, slowing down and keeping the peace can be the right choice. There are times when caution matters more than speed.
But what happens when there's real potential on the table? When you know the company could get to the next stage - but nobody is pulling in the same direction?
That's when someone has to step up. To carry the clarity. To make the trade-offs stick, even when it means disappointing people. And it only works if the support is there - without that, the impact never lands.
Because the hard part of strategy isn't writing the plan. It's making it real enough that people trust it, act on it, and keep moving.
A good strategy isn't judged by how tidy the slides look. It's judged by the quality of the decisions it makes possible. And when belief is there, those decisions compound. Without it, even the best-looking strategy is just theatre.
