Leader’s Question: “Is my strategy too informal to scale?”
In the early life of an organization, informality can be a strength.
The owner knows the business well. The team is small. Communication is fast. Decisions happen in real time. Priorities can be adjusted in a conversation, in a hallway, or over a quick coffee. A great deal of the strategy lives in the head of the owner, and for a while, that works.
Then the organization grows.
More people are added. Functions become more specialized. Decisions are made further from the centre. Communication takes more effort. Different parts of the business begin to experience different pressures. And what once felt agile starts to feel uneven.
This is the moment when growth begins to punish informality.
My new workbook speaks directly to this. It notes that in early-stage and smaller organizations, strategy often exists implicitly, but as the organization grows, that approach begins to fail. Strategy must move from being understood to being explicit.
That does not mean the answer is to create a thick binder full of strategic language and polished charts.
In fact, that is often where the next mistake begins.
When strategy becomes more complicated than the business needs
Many owners eventually realize they need to formalize strategy.
That realization is correct.
But then they go looking for help and find what are often called best practices. The trouble is that many of those practices were designed for larger, more layered, more mature organizations. They are not always wrong. They are often simply too much.
The owner adopts a more elaborate process than the business actually needs. More categories are added. More inputs are collected. More ambitions are documented. The strategy becomes heavier, more detailed, and more complicated than it needs to be to guide real decisions.
Instead of creating clarity, it creates drag.
Worse still, the strategy can begin to take on a life of its own.
It becomes a kind of sponge. Every desire, every possibility, every idea the owner has been carrying around gets absorbed into it. The strategy stops being a tool for focus and starts becoming a container for aspiration.
That may feel productive, but it usually is not.
A strategy that tries to include everything eventually guides nothing.
Strategy is not a wish list
One of the strongest ideas in the workbook is this: strategy is about making deliberate choices over time. It defines where the organization is going, what it will focus on, and what it will not do.
That last part matters a great deal.
What it will not do.
A real strategy is not a long document capturing every attractive possibility. It is a disciplined set of choices that helps the owner decide what shall be pursued and what shall not be pursued in light of the vision for the company.
That is why I often think of strategy as a razor, not a sponge.
A sponge absorbs.
A razor cuts away.
It helps the owner say:
- this fits our direction
- this does not
- this matters now
- this can wait
- this is attractive, but not strategic
Without that discipline, strategy becomes overloaded very quickly. It starts to look impressive, but it becomes much less useful in everyday leadership.
The workbook makes this point very clearly: strategy is not a list of everything the organization hopes to improve. It is a set of deliberate choices about where to focus limited time, attention, and resources.
Explicit does not mean overbuilt
Some leaders hear the phrase “make strategy explicit” and assume that means making it more complex.
Not at all.
Explicit means clear enough to be communicated, understood, and used.
It means the owner can explain the direction of the business in a way that managers can actually apply. It means priorities are visible. It means trade-offs are clearer. It means delegation becomes more effective because people have context, not just instructions.
The guide says this directly: strategy needs to be explicit not only so it can be understood, but so it can be used as context for effective delegation.
That is a very different standard from creating a sophisticated planning document.
The test is not whether the strategy looks polished.
The test is whether it helps people make better decisions.
The right amount of structure
As organizations grow, they do need more structure.
That is normal. Increased scale requires increased complexity in systems and management disciplines. But that increase should be appropriate to the scale and complexity of the business. It should support execution, not bury it.
The workbook is intentionally practical in this regard. It lays out the core elements of a strategic plan in a structured but usable way: mission, vision, values, strategic positioning, strategic goals, measures, timing, and resources.
That is enough structure to create clarity.
It is not meant to become an administrative performance.
In fact, the guide explicitly warns against treating planning as an administrative exercise. Plans should be used as working documents in decisions, delegation, and one-to-one conversations, not completed and then set aside.
That warning is an important one.
Because in many organizations, the strategy becomes an event instead of a tool.
The owner’s real job in strategy
At its best, strategy gives the owner a way to bring discipline to choice.
It helps answer questions like:
- What business are we really in?
- Where are we trying to go?
- How will we create distinctive value?
- What must be achieved?
- What resources will this require?
- What are we deliberately choosing not to chase?
Those questions are central to the workbook’s strategic planning guide. The intent is not just to produce a document, but to surface and structure the owner’s thinking so the strategy can guide execution.
This is why the owner cannot simply borrow a strategic planning process from a much larger company and expect it to fit.
The right strategy process should fit the real complexity of the organization, not an imagined version of what a more sophisticated company might do.
Good strategy is not about sounding bigger.
It is about becoming clearer.
When informality stops working
There is usually a recognizable point when informal strategy stops being enough.
People begin to pull in slightly different directions. Managers interpret priorities differently. Projects multiply. Resource conflicts increase. The owner feels the need to explain the same thing repeatedly. Decisions start coming back upward because people lack the context to make them confidently.
That is usually not a sign that people have failed.
It is a sign that the strategy is still too informal for the scale of the organization.
The workbook’s executive summary captures this clearly: most owners and CEOs already have a strategy, but as organizations grow and become more complex, informal communication and good intentions are no longer enough.
At that point, the answer is not more verbal reinforcement.
The answer is to make the strategy explicit in a way that is simple, focused, and usable.
Final Thought
If your strategy still lives mostly in your head, that may be a sign of entrepreneurial strength.
But if the organization is growing, it may also be becoming a risk.
The solution is not to overcomplicate strategy.
The solution is to make it explicit enough to guide choices, focus effort, and support delegation.
A good strategy should not become a sponge for every ambition. It should become a razor that helps the organization decide what matters, what fits the vision, and what should be left aside.
That is one of the central purposes of When Strategy Doesn’t Deliver: How Value Added Planning Turns Intent into Results. It is designed as a practical field guide to help leaders turn strategic thinking into an execution system that actually works.
Explore my books on Amazon, including When Strategy Doesn’t Deliver: How Value Added Planning Turns Intent into Results: Amazon Author Page
Available through Amazon as a low-cost black-and-white paperback or a full-colour Kindle edition. Coming soon a full-colour interactive PDF workbook form my web site.
