The strategy announcement that changed nothing…
How to get from strategy to aligned action, faster
Ying, the CEO of a large private hospital, has been working on a new strategy for the past 3 months. Her executive team conducted customer interviews, ran market analyses and internal diagnostics, and had difficult conversations about what it would mean to follow through.
A two-day offsite in the woods was the final step to nail down the wording. It was exhausting but energizing. Driving home, Ying felt good about what they’d built.
One week later, they host a company-wide webinar to share the new direction. More than 200 people dial in. The executive team enthusiastically presents the strategy. At the end, Ying asks: “Are there any questions?”
Resounding silence.
Ali, the Head of HR, isn’t surprised. She knows speaking up in a large virtual room with the executive team present is scary. She was prepared for this and invites people to submit questions anonymously via a tool.
Reactions start pouring in:
“It looks very similar to last year. What is actually new?”
“This sounds great on paper, but I have no idea what it means for my work.”
“Our main competitor just opened a location nearby. Why is there nothing in the strategy about that?”
The quantity and tone of the feedback fluster the executive team. The webinar is coming to an end without time to address the questions. Ying wraps up: “Thanks for your excellent input. I expect you to have further discussions in your teams on how to implement it.”
Ali hears a collective sigh and tangibly feels the disappointment.
Everyone goes about their business as usual. Nothing changes.
This is one of the stories from my book Unblock, based on patterns I’ve seen repeatedly. And every time I share it, leaders in the room nod: they’ve lived it.
Why nobody heard what you just said
Here’s what’s going on beneath the surface.
By the time your leadership team announces a new direction, you’ve had weeks or months of conversations about it. You’ve weighed trade-offs, explored alternatives, debated options, and slept on it. You’ve been thinking about this every single day, and it starts to feel obvious.
But for everyone else, it’s brand new.
When my colleague Koen de Boer and I ran a diagnostic across 150 leaders, 40% reported a disconnect between their organization’s strategy and their daily work. The strategy was announced. It just never landed.
So when the big announcement happens, leaders think: great, communication done. Let’s execute and move on. But for the people who need to make it real, the announcement is just the start. They’re still processing while you’re already expecting results.
And even when they do hear it, there’s a second gap.
What does your strategy mean to the person who has to act on it in their specific context, with their specific pressures, facing their specific problems?
Every person receiving your strategy has to build meaning from it, filtering it through their own experience and challenges. That’s how human cognition works. The question is whether you’re designing for it or hoping it doesn’t cause problems.
Show, don’t just tell
People pay far more attention to your feet than your lips.
Every decision you make either reinforces or undermines your message. Did you kill a project that was 80% done because it served the old strategy? That tells people the new direction is real. Did you turn down a big client because the work no longer aligns? That's a signal. Did you move budget from a profitable legacy product to a new capability that doesn't have revenue yet? People notice.
The best leaders I’ve worked with demonstrate the strategy through their actions: we hired these people, we stopped this, we invested in that.
That’s more powerful than any presentation.
What to do instead: be in dialogue
So if one big reveal doesn’t work, what does?
In my experience, the answer is deceptively simple: replace the announcement with ongoing dialogue.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Share ideas before they’re polished. When your leadership team is still forming the strategy, bring early thinking to a few teams. Share your hypothesis. Ask them: does this resonate? What are we missing? What would we need to execute on this? You’ll learn things the boardroom can’t teach you. And you’ll avoid the painful discovery, way too late, that your shiny new idea isn’t viable.
Create recurring spaces for conversation. One senior executive I’ve worked with hosts weekly lunches where she invites a cross-section of the organization to discuss the strategy. It’s informal, it’s small, and it’s ongoing. That regularity is what makes it work. Another approach: host a quarterly Ask Me Anything. Limit your update to 15 minutes, then let people submit questions anonymously and vote on which ones to discuss. Google does a version of this every month for its 190,000 employees.
Keep talking long after you think it’s done. What feels like tiring overcommunication to you is just the minimum needed for people to start hearing what you’re trying to say. In my experience, you need to repeat a message at least five or six times before it even begins to stick. Not because people aren’t paying attention. Because they’re busy, they have their own context, and they need time to process what the strategy means for their work.
From cascading to self-alignment
There’s a deeper upside to early dialogue that goes beyond better communication.
Most organizations cascade strategy top-down, like a waterfall that flows in one direction. Executives send the finished strategy down to middle management, who are tasked with communicating it and holding teams accountable. This creates alignment, but it promotes compliance rather than commitment.
There’s a better way. Instead of cascading the strategy, invite teams to align themselves.
Ask every team: “Given the overarching strategy and your team’s domain, what is your role in this? How will you contribute? What will you prioritize and deprioritize?”
When teams answer that question, two things happen.
First, they surface knowledge that only they have. The nurse who knows the hiring market. The sales rep who’s hearing what competitors are doing. The engineer who can tell you which initiatives will collide.
Second, they develop ownership. Because they decided how to contribute.
If you cascade a finished strategy downward, you get compliance. If you invite people to shape it and align themselves, you get commitment. And commitment is what turns a strategy into results.
One thing to try
You don’t need to overhaul your communication strategy overnight. Here is what I suggest you try.
Pick one strategic priority you’ve been developing behind closed doors. Before it’s polished, bring it to a team that will have to execute on it for a conversation. Share what you’re thinking and ask three questions: What resonates? What are we missing? What would make this impossible?
Then listen.
That single conversation will teach you more about whether your strategy will land than any all-hands ever could. And the people in that room will walk out feeling like the strategy is partly theirs. Because it is.
Less announcing. More conversing.
Dive deeper
Read the article below for practical examples of how teams can self-align. It’s the natural next step after everything in this newsletter.
Hear me discuss the subject on the Strategy Meets Reality podcast:
That’s it. I hope this resonates. If it did, grab your copy of one of my books Formula X or Unblock. Or book me as a speaker at your next event. To get in touch, simply hit ‘reply’ or comment. I read every message.
You can usually tell who actually understands systems by whether they simplify complexity or just add another layer on top of it.