Strategy Doesn’t Fail in the Deck. It Fails Every Tuesday Afternoon.
Strategy Is a Theory
It Needs to Be Tried, and It Needs to Be Tested.
A strategy is never true or false. It’s a set of bets about what will work, given the current moment and everything in it. Which means it must do two things: reach the decisions it is meant to shape, and pass the tests of whether it is still a good bet.
Few organizations do both well.
Strategy never reaches the moment of judgment. Leadership spends months building it — offsites, frameworks, decks full of careful thinking. Then it goes out through town halls, emails, scorecards and training. And it fades.
- Only 28% of executives can name three of their company’s strategic priorities (HBR)
- 67% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution (Fortune)
- “Strategy is an often-misunderstood concept,” and that lack of understanding produces unproductive debates and flawed decisions (McKinsey)
So as a sales rep tries to close a deal, or a support agent hears from a livid customer, the strategy has already faded from view.
Leaders don’t get the feedback to revise it. When they do, it usually arrives as results — after the fact. Then you’re playing catch-up, to competitors or just to your own potential.
The reason is structural.
Strategy gets updated at an event. For some companies that’s a retreat. For others it’s an entire season — a rigorous goal-setting and budgeting process. But whichever version, it is finite. It has a start and an end.
While it’s open, there is a great deal of research into the conditions. When it closes, there is no medium for that evidence-gathering to continue. And nothing is static.
The validity of the strategy isn’t even knowable until it meets the world: the reaction of customers, the calls to the help desk, what a rep keeps hearing from prospects.
Changes can render a strategy invalid, or insufficient. But there is no route back to the drawing board. That information waits for the next cycle, unless the results are disastrous enough to force an emergency.
Two directions. Neither one completes.
What Changes
Contextuum starts by schematizing your strategy — turning it from prose into data. Your vision, priorities, trade-offs and decision principles, made explicit and query-able.
That sounds like a small thing. But it’s a huge thing. A schema can do what a document cannot: it can benefit from the skills AI now provides.
So, it can enter the working judgment of thousands of people at once.
And it can be checked against the world it depends on.
Both Directions Complete
Contextuum uses the schema to give every team member a way to apply the strategy to the decisions their own job demands — learned by working through gamified, realistic scenarios.
It also reads signals from those interactions and from the world, surfacing what has changed through Strategic Radar, and what the strategy is missing through Diamond Mine.
Both directions become navigable. Leadership can shift the strategy to meet a change or seize an opportunity it had missed.
An Answer, Not the Answer
The magic of everyone truly knowing the strategy in their bones is familiar to anyone who’s been to a Trader Joe’s or a Ritz-Carlton. It’s a precious sense of mission that delivers cohesion, coordination and vivid clarity to customers, investors, employees and partners.
That’s a strategy that reaches every decision.
The other half looks different. It is Intel’s leadership switching from memory to processors because of new and cheaper competitors in the memory space. That shift took a little-known memory company to “Intel Inside.”
And it is a struggling video game company noticing that rival studios kept asking to use the internal communication tool it had built for itself. We know it now as Slack.
In both cases somebody recognized the evidence — a change in conditions, and new evidence from customers — and changed the strategy.
These organizations managed it without AI and without us. But it’s rare.
We don’t believe Contextuum is the end of this problem. It’s the beginning of understanding it — and of creating novel ways to solve it.
For us, this is an ongoing inquiry, one we hope you will join.
About the Founder
Amié Devero
Amié Devero is the founder and CEO of Contextuum. She has 30 years of experience as a strategy consultant and executive coach. Between consulting roles, she was President of RingGo US — the market-leading parking-payment company — heading its expansion from the UK and Europe into North America. She has also led several other technology companies. Her 2008 book, Powered by Principle, is available in multiple editions worldwide.
30+ years as a strategy consultant and executive coach to myriad organizations, leaders and industries. Former President and Managing Director of RingGo (US). Author of the book Powered by Principle: Using Core Values to Build World-Class Organizations. Amié writes about strategy and leadership at BeyondBetter.io/blog.
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