Do You Have a Strategy or a Stragedy

The buzz around strategy

For more than a decade, popular management literature has been flooded with opinions on what strategy is and how to develop one. At the same time, almost every executive board meeting includes some sort of a discussion about it. Hence, it is safe to say that “strategy” has become one of the most overused words in business.

With this in mind, it seems we’ve entered an era where management finally knows how to create strategy while every organization claims to have one. But if that’s true, why don’t we see a corresponding uplift in performance?

To answer that, let’s take a step back and examine what strategy really is. Broadly, it can be viewed from two perspectives: proactive and reactive.

Two ways to look at strategy

From the proactive perspective, strategy is intended and it precedes action. It is formulated first and then implemented. Therefore, we may say that strategy is about making choices and then making sure these choices are implemented. 

Michael Porter (1996) captured this elegantly: “Strategy renders choices about what not to do as well as choices about what to do.” Roger Martin (2025) was a bit more specific as he defined strategy as: “An integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action.” 

This view suggests that not all organizations actually have a strategy. I believe we can easily agree that a lot of organizations make decisions that are not internally congruent, while some of them make choices that do not even result in desired customer action. In the long run, not having a strategy usually leads to a situation where: “… decisions get made and unmade, resources are spent on things that are not really relevant, people end up confused...” (McGrath, 2019, p. 183)

Only those organizations that make deliberate, coherent, and timely choices, both internally aligned and externally relevant, qualify as having a strategy. 

From the reactive perspective, strategy is seen only in retrospect. Henry Mintzberg and James McHugh (1985) described a strategy viewed from this perspective as: “A pattern in a stream of decisions or actions.”

In this view, a strategy is not being devised and then implemented. This boundary is nonexistent and these two processes are blended together. Hence, strategy is only what an organization actually did over a longer period of time. By looking back, one can see a trajectory shaped by major decisions and actions; not the ideas or choices that came before that. 

In other words, the retrospective look only reveals what was delivered, not what was intended. It can’t tell us whether choices were deliberate or accidental; only whether they formed a coherent pattern or pulled the organization in different directions.

However, only in retrospect we are able to assess the effectiveness of strategies as we can analyze the connection between decisions made and actions taken with the results achieved. When looking from the proactive perspective, no one knows for sure if the choices made will result in desired customer action.

Between these two perspectives, the proactive one offers a much clearer path to shaping the future. It helps organizations deliberately design their actions, rather than merely explain it after the fact. This is why we will continue our discussion from a proactive perspective only. 

Enter the Stragedy

How should we interpret all those organizations (that we see so often) that claim to have a strategy but, in reality, operate through a string of unaligned, inconsistent choices? They have a strategy that lives on paper, not in practice.

Such organizations are often on the road to tragedy, while proudly believing they have a strategy. This is a phenomenon I started calling a stragedy. 

In practice, stragedy comes in many forms on a continuum from no strategy to having a strategy: 

• Most extreme level occupy organizations that define a vision or mission and perhaps a few goals, but with no real understanding of customer needs, required actions, or resources. They talk about where they want to go, but not how they’ll get there.

• A step away from the extreme are those organizations that have defined their end state and even actions and resources but failed to connect them to the customer journey or the capabilities needed to deliver results over time.
  They have pieces of the puzzle, but no coherent picture.

• The next level in strategy maturity is populated with organizations that understand customer needs, actions, and resources, and have real capabilities to deliver. Yet they lack the metrics, ownership, and governance to track progress and adjust along the way.

Claiming to have a strategy without integrating purpose, actions, capabilities, and metrics into a coherent system is, at best, naive, and at worst, dangerous. These organizations are not executing on their strategy but instead are running a stragedy.

A strategy connects the customers and their needs, with an organization’s actions, capabilities, metrics, and other elements needed to successfully fulfill those needs. Everything else is a stragedy – an illusion of having a strategy.
 

References:

Martin, R. (2025). Revisiting My Definition of Strategy: Compelling Desired Customer Action, Medium, https://rogermartin.medium.com/revisiting-my-definition-of-strategy-76a838aba818

McGrath, R. (2019). Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen, Mariner Books.

Porter, M. E. (1996). What is Strategy? Harvard Business Review, Vol. 74, No. 6, pp. 61-78.

Mintzberg, H. & McHugh, A. (1985). Strategy Formation in an Adhocracy, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 160-197.