Too much business strategy and foresight work is designed to tell leaders what they already know, or what they want to hear. By focusing on appearances, perception, and external possibility, rather than hard reality, this work sells us the illusion of a map while leaving us more lost than we ever were. Like wrestlers putting on a show, it can be fun to watch but it's not a real sport.

Effective strategy needs to cut through this performative layer, to help businesses skate not to a nebulous idea of where the puck is going to be, but to wherever the hell it actually is right now, and to figure out how it even got there in the first place.

Even the most robust, forward-looking strategy means nothing if your plumbing is broken. Where the instinct might be to move fast and break things, too often this means moving fast into a wall. Instead, we say move slowly and fix things. Transformation is never done. Plans are never finished. Resilient governance sets you up to sustain shocks in the most unstable of operating environments. By focussing as much in the depths of structure, process, organisational psychology and decision-making as we do on the road forward, we manage transformational energy and achieve realistic long-term outcomes through marathons, not sprints.

All businesses operate at the intersection of hidden systems, and systems within systems— internal and external forces that shape both how they operate now, and what’s coming for them in the future. Operations that used to take place in plain sight have been replaced by complex abstractions, happening deep below surface. But not everything that looks like an iceberg from above has something truly substantial below, and too much time is wasted diving in the wrong places, searching for threats that are no longer relevant.

All stakeholders in a business, from bookkeepers to marketers to investors to customers and community, have their own view on its reality, and their own perception of its successes and failures. It is in the sum total of all these points of view that we can reveal new truth.

You can’t see the gaps in your reality from inside of it. Just as companies hire cybersecurity firms to uncover threats from outside, the same is needed on a strategic level – rigorous research that cuts through internal bias and blindness and speaks difficult truth.

Planning processes that start and end with groups gathered in a boardroom to ideate and communicate by sticky note amplify every systemic failure we’ve already outlined. They result in outputs that are of little tactical value, only documenting what is already known, in a form compromised by the energy and dynamics of the day and the existing filters and knowledge of the participants. Innovation is not a theatre and it is not a lab. Workshops and planning sessions held in response to research and the critical toolbox cut through this to the heart of the matter.

Ask yourself, if your phone rang and it was Oprah Winfrey, giving you a single opportunity to tell the world what your business is and why they should care about it, what would you actually say? What are you going to tell Oprah? She doesn’t want to hear about your dynamic solutions for innovative opportunity. She doesn’t want a mission statement. Nobody does. She wants your purpose. Your secret. A company needs to know the story it has to tell. It needs to express how it sees the world, and why it feels it has the right to exist in it. It needs to use this story to inform everything else, from planning to product decisions. If it can’t usefully do that with its existing mission or vision, then that mission and vision don’t reflect the company as they need to.

If you walk into a high-end kitchen showroom, you’ll be told how your cooking will reach professional levels with a Wolf range, a Subzero fridge, maybe a block of Japanese knives. But if you ask a professional chef what you actually need, where they would start in their kitchen, it probably won’t be flashy – a few sheet pans, two good knives, maybe a decent Dutch oven. A cutting board, but the IKEA one will do just as well as any other. A good set of basic tools will not be the cheapest, but also not the most expensive. They’re not the only tools, but if you don’t start with them, nothing else is going to work. These are the tools that take you from having a kitchen, to being a cook.

It’s the same for businesses – a set of core tools to cover the fundamentals don’t just cover the basics for you, but set you up to improvise, to thrive, to cook with what’s at hand.