Strategy is a struggle

Across the work we’re doing in 2025, one theme has emerged.

One clear problem that leadership teams are grappling with.

Why are we not making enough progress on our strategy?

• A leadership team had put huge effort into defining, capturing, and communicating their key priorities for 2024 – but most of these strategic priorities were ignored in the reality of day-to-day work.

• A CEO and management team worked carefully to define the organisation’s ‘big rocks’. Every management meeting they’d review these core priorities. And every time there was no progress. Managers would say “I’ve been too busy.” Those rocks weren’t rolling.

The daily battle: Knowing what you need to do is not enough

I could go on, but the theme of these cases is already evident:

Defining the strategy and priorities is not even half the battle.

The main battle is to balance what I call the ‘proactive work’ of leading the strategy, with the ‘reactive work’ of managing incoming demands.

This is a daily battle. Leaders are inundated with demands for their attention every day - but must find a way to keep their focus on progressing the business’s longer team, strategic, transformational goals every week.

The solutions are non-obvious

What we see most people default to is –

a) work harder – and risk burn-out

b) repeated attempts to prioritise everything.

It’s a struggle.

A struggle to balance the reactive and proactive. Our long-term goals and short-term focus can often be in competition with each other.

How can we reduce the conflict; and simplify the struggle?

We’ve been experimenting with leaders and leadership teams and here are 3 ideas that are non-obvious.

1. Eliminate the barrier between BAU and strategy

Instead of business-as-usual work competing with the strategic work, can you integrate them so that you build strategic work into day-to-day deliverables?

2. Measure inputs and outputs

As well as measuring outputs of your strategic initiatives, ask leaders how much time they can/should spend each week progressing the major strategic initiatives, and then get people to track their time.

3. Change the time horizon

12-month and 3-month planning cycles might be too long for you. We’re seeing success from planning strategic work in 6-week cycles, so you can understand how the strategy looks in your calendar for the next few weeks – how much can I realistically achieve alongside my other obligations?

Building the capacity to deliver your strategy

These 3 ideas are part of a program of work we’re doing with leadership teams called ‘Building the capacity to deliver your strategy”.

Over time, teams can increase their strategic capacity - and become better able to manage competing demands on their attention.

The results?

More strategy. Less struggle.

I’d love to know what you think, are you experiencing strategy struggles? What do you do to make daily progress on your biggest priorities? Drop me a line by replying to this email.

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If you want to listen to a podcast where I talk about this issue and the solutions, I am on the latest issue of Let’s Strategize It Out with David Boldeman on Spotify. Listen here.