Strategy Is a Practice, Not a Plan

I have written many strategies in my life. For over twenty years, a good part of my work was helping organisations think, long sessions, careful analysis, and a document at the end that named the vision, the pillars, the priorities. Some of those documents were, if I may say so, rather good. Clear. Beautifully argued. However, some of them ended up exactly where good strategy documents go to rest: in a drawer, on a shelf, in a shared folder no one opened again until the next planning cycle.

For a long time I thought the problem was execution, that the thinking was sound, and only the follow-through was weak. I have changed my mind. I now think the trouble starts earlier, in what we believe a strategy is.

Building KaraSpace taught me this in a way consulting never quite did, because at KaraSpace I could not hand the plan to someone else and move on. I had to live inside it. And no plan I wrote for KaraSpace survived contact with a real Tuesday. Customers behaved differently from the model. A staff member left. An idea I was sure of fell flat, and one I had nearly cut became the thing people loved. The document was out of date within weeks.

What did not go out of date was the practice: the returning, again and again, to a few honest questions. What is actually happening? What is this teaching me? Given what I now know, what should we do differently this week? That rhythm of paying attention and adjusting turned out to be worth more than any single plan.

So I have come to think of strategy less as a noun and more as a verb. Not the document, but the discipline. Not “the strategy”, the thing on the shelf, but strategising: the ongoing act of staying clear about where you are going while staying honest about what is in front of you.

This is not an argument against planning. A plan matters. It forces you to think, to make your assumptions explicit, to choose. But a plan is a snapshot, true on the day it was taken, and ageing from that moment. The practice is what keeps it alive. Without the practice, even the best plan can become a monument.

At Akijul, and at KaraSpace, I try to hold it differently now. The strategy and plan is where we start the conversation, not where we end it. We expect it to change. We build in the returning: the regular, unglamorous act of looking at what is real and asking what it means. The document on the shelf was never the point. The point was learning to see clearly, and to keep adjusting, in a world that will not sit still for us.

Strategy is not something you finish. It is something you practise.

What plan have you been treating as a finished monument, when it might serve you better as a living tool?