Most people think strategy work is all about driving results when it’s not. The latter is management work, while strategy is the agonizing task of diagnosing constraints and designing a pathway that cuts through conflicting values.
Leaders mistakenly believe they can solve complex, gnarly challenges by breaking them down into “manageable and measurable” chunks, setting goals, and getting after it. That’s management work, and while the approach sounds logical at first, it exclusively relies on quantification (of budgets, productivity, headcount, and everything else that can be crammed into a spreadsheet or a dashboard) while ignoring factors like human emotion, culture, or organizational politics.
That’s precisely what differentiates strategy from management — strategy demands thinking, context, and judgment that no spreadsheet can capture.
The big question, however, is this: what makes smart, intelligent leaders think that strategy work is a linear planning model when they are aware that risks, constraints, and problems are never linear?