Most Teams Don’t Do Strategy. They Do Theatre.

Most people treat strategy like a verdict. A choice gets made, someone says “this is the direction,” and then the machinery starts turning. But what if the direction itself isn’t wrong — it’s just not sustainable?

I’ve seen this firsthand. A CEO wants to keep all four product lines. The team revolts: “We can’t keep doing this.” But nobody asks the more interesting question: What would it take to stay on this path? What if it’s not impossible — just expensive? What if we just need to raise money? What if the strategy’s fine and the constraints are the real problem?

We never ask those questions. Because it’s easier to say “No” instead of asking “What if”.

I learned this a few companies ago.

We went all in on depth. We branded ourselves around one thing — became “the ___ company.” We wore it like a badge. Meanwhile, a competitor went broad. We dismissed them. We called their product shallow, unfocused, unserious.

But here’s the punchline: they’re still around. We’re not.

Turns out most customers didn’t want depth. They wanted relief. They didn’t care about our 98% of extra features — because they weren’t experiencing those problems. We were building for elegance. They were buying for survival.

That experience punched me in the face. Strategy is the thing that actually sets you apart while solving something a customer genuinely gives a damn about.

If your “big bet” doesn’t create a real advantage, it’s not strategy. It’s just expensive storytelling, likely, accompanied with a set of nice PowerPoint slides.

But that’s not even the worst part.

The worst part is that we never really formulated a strategy. Not properly. We never spent time asking: What is the problem we’re trying to solve? What are all the ways we could solve it? What tradeoffs are we willing to make? We defaulted to action. And action feels good… at first.

The truth is, most teams don’t do strategy. They do theatre. They stack half-decisions into a PowerPoint and call it direction. But there’s no rigor. No clear alternatives. No framework to weigh “this” against “that.”

That’s what real strategy requires: structure. Comparison. Willingness to design multiple paths — not just commit to the first idea that gets head nods. It means doing the hard, boring work of defining the problem before racing to solutions.

I’ve come to believe that if a strategy conversation doesn’t spend at least a 3 hours aligning on the problem definition—not even strategic possibilities— it’s not real. You’re playing chess without setting up the board.

Strategy is hard. It’s supposed to be. It’s what competition feels like. If it feels easy, you’re probably iterating your way into a ditch.