Ask a manager to tell you the strategy and they will send you the file. Eighty pages, well argued, approved in a room you were not in. Ask them what it means for Tuesday and the answer takes longer.
Here is a test we use. Imagine the file is lost tonight. Every copy, every deck, every spreadsheet of KPIs. What is left of your strategy tomorrow morning?
In most companies, nothing. The strategy was a document, and the document is gone. In a few, almost everything: the managers can say where the company is going in one sentence, they know which three things they are doing differently this quarter, and a team leader two levels down can tell a new hire what the company refuses to do. In those companies the document was never the strategy. It was a souvenir of it.
We have spent fifteen years in management consulting watching intelligent strategies fail in most companies, for the same reason. A car maker's division received its strategy by email, as a spreadsheet. A leader in China could not summarise the plan a big-name firm had written for him, and nobody around him could either. A lender's managers had sat through workshops and could not find a word of what they had said in the text that came back. In each case the thinking was good. The strategy did not exist, because a strategy that nobody can own is paper.
So here is what we think a strategy is. Not the smartest plan written by the best brains. The plan your organisation can write itself, to the edge of what it can do, with someone in the room supplying the material and asking the questions that were not asked. Decisive about where it is going. Written so that every function sees itself in it. Short enough to be said, and said often enough to become a habit.
One last thing. "Plus 5%" is not a strategy. It is an ambition, and only the two people you told know it. A strategy is the moment the people who have to live it say, in front of you: here is how I see it. Before that moment there is a document. After it, there is movement.