Twelve weeks ago, I started this curriculum with two questions. What is strategy? And why does it matter?
I still can’t answer either one completely. What I can do now is see more clearly — where strategy breaks down, why smart people get it wrong, what the fault lines look like from the inside. That’s not the same as having it figured out. It’s a sharper lens on something that keeps moving.
If there’s one idea running underneath all eleven fault lines, it’s this: strategy is the art and practice of becoming. Not a destination. Not a document. Not a title you earn or a framework you apply. A practice — iterative, imperfect, never finished. There’s no such thing as a set strategy. It keeps changing based on circumstances, market dynamics, leadership, and the people involved. The moment you treat it as fixed, it starts to fail you.
What comes next isn’t a conclusion. It’s a different set of questions.
Identifying the fault lines is the foundation — understanding what strategy is, where it breaks down, and what effective looks like versus ineffective. But knowing that doesn’t tell you how to get started, how to tackle the obstacles, how to bring others along when there’s resistance, how to stay oriented when everything is moving at once. That’s the application layer. The harder work. And that’s where this goes next.
I’m sharing this in public because that’s what makes it real.
As a practitioner, I’m always tinkering — reasserting what I believe, questioning it, finding something new. If I keep all of that private, what am I doing with it? Saving it for whom? Great ideas need to be challenged, and to do so, they have to be exposed. Not prematurely — you keep your mouth shut while the thinking is still forming. But once it’s developed enough to stand on its own, you take it to the world. So people can adopt it, question it, apply it, push back on it, and share it further.
That’s not just the reason for this post. It’s the reason this whole curriculum exists.
The practice never ends. Neither does the writing.
P.S. This is the final post in a twelve-week curriculum exploring the fault lines that run through strategy, leadership, and organizational life. Start at the beginning — The Fluff Illusion is where it all started. And if you want the weekly essays that go deeper than the blog posts, subscribe to The Blind Spot — they go out every Sunday.