A Case for Human-Inspired Strategy
When strategies fail, it is often not because the ideas behind it were wrong, but because peoples’ behaviors didn’t change.
Plans are written. Slide decks are polished. Town halls are held. But inside the organization, the same structures, incentives, workflows, and routines remain in place. The strategy is new but the behavior is not.
This is the cause behind many stalled initiatives and unrealized visions. A strategy that doesn’t shift how people think, decide, and behave is only a document.
Strategy execution is human work, and it succeeds when executives lead people to change together.
Why Strategies Fail
Organizations spend enormous energy crafting the perfect plan: market analysis, competitive intelligence, and precise goals. Yet too often, those plans meet resistance once they reach the people who must carry them out.
The problem isn’t poor communication or lack of skill. It’s misalignment. Systems, incentives, relationships, and habits built for yesterday’s priorities continue to drive behavior today.
You probably know the symptoms well:
- Execution fatigue: teams exhausted by annual planning cycles that don't produce change.
- Cultural drag: employees nod along but don't really believe.
- Governance gridlock: boards and executives are aligned in language, but not in behavior.
Across industries and sectors, strategies stumble not because the goals are unclear, but because the people responsible for achieving them are still operating inside the context of the old world.
The diagnosis is simple but profound: strategy fails when behavior stays the same.
Strategic Execution Is Identity Work
Information alone rarely creates change. If it did, everyone who read the strategic plan would act differently the next day.
Behavioral science has shown that identity, not information, drives sustained change. When a new strategy threatens how people see themselves — their role, their competence, their sense of belonging — they can resist. And resistance isn’t defiance; it’s self-protection. Executives and front line team members are equally affected by threats to their identity in times of disruption.
Change becomes lasting when it feels like an expression of who people are, rather than a betrayal of it. As identity-based motivation theory shows, people act in ways that reinforce their self-concepts. When they see themselves as part of a new story, one that aligns with purpose and pride, behavior follows naturally.
That’s why data, metrics, and slogans alone rarely move people. But stories and narratives that align identity do.
I learned this firsthand leading patient-experience work at a health system. Our leadership team had stared at flat satisfaction scores for years. Nothing changed, until we replaced charts with real stories.
At a retreat, executives were paired off to brainstorm ideal experiences for different patient scenarios, like a new pregnancy or a cancer diagnosis. After sharing their ideal experiences, they opened sealed envelopes containing true patient accounts of failure and frustration in those same scenarios. The silence in that room was visceral. The conversation shifted from “scores” to “what our patients go through” and “who are we if we deliver this kind of care.” Their identity as leaders of a system of high-quality care was threatened by stories of real failure. And this provided the motivation to make real changes — small actions at first and over time, the culture and the performance changed.
In this case, and in many, emotion precedes motion. Human understanding turns strategy from an intellectual exercise into a moral imperative and a function of each team member’s identity.
The Guiding Policy: Make Strategy Human
Shift Group was founded on a simple conviction: strategy only works if people change. And people change when they feel seen and understood and are involved in creating the change. Our context always informs our behavior.
Traditional strategy is often a top-down act of analysis and instruction. Human-inspired strategy is participatory by design. It starts with empathy and understanding the real problem or challenge, connects through identity, and sustains through purpose and meaning.
Our guiding policy is to treat strategy as behavior design — aligning the human system with organizational ambition. That means:
- Understanding how people experience the system today.
- Designing participation that builds ownership.
- Connecting the plan to intrinsic motivation like mastery, autonomy, purpose, and extrinsic incentives like finance and recognition.
- Equipping leaders to model the future, not merely describe it.
Strategy, at its best, becomes a shared act of imagination — a collective redefinition of “who we are now”, “who we want to be”, and “what we do next.”
The Shift Method: From Plan to Practice
A strategy that inspires but never activates wastes resources. A plan that activates without inspiration burns out quickly. Shift’s work bridges the gap.
We use a structured, research-informed method — Discover → Align → Activate → Sustain— blending classic strategy tools with human-centered design. It delivers the rigor executives expect while addressing the real reason plans succeed or fail: human behavior.
Coherent Actions: How to Build Strategy That Moves People
Discover the Human Reality
Every strategy begins with understanding reality — but not just the market reality.
Traditional approaches like market studies, environmental scans, and competitor analyses remain vital. They reveal the external forces shaping your landscape — consumer trends, technologies, regulation, and market shifts. But on their own, they tell only half the story.
The other half lives inside the organization: in conversations, relationships, stories, trust, and daily routines.
That’s why the Shift discovery process goes beyond classic data collection and analysis. We combine traditional quantitative and secondary research with ethnographic listening, stakeholder interviews, and field observation.
We ask:
- How do people actually experience this organization?
- What beliefs and routines shape their decisions?
- Where are there gaps between what leaders say and what employees feel?
By integrating external insight (what’s changing around you) with internal understanding (how your people interpret that change), we surface the real strategic challenge that must be solved before any plan can succeed.
As Richard Rumelt reminds us, good strategy starts with a clear diagnosis. For us, that diagnosis includes both the market and the mind.
Synthesize: Reframe the Challenge
Most organizations rush from data to decision and as a result are not addressing the real challenge or root cause. A lasting strategy requires reframing and pausing to ensure you’re solving the right problem, not just the obvious one.
Using design-thinking methods, we help leaders see their challenges through multiple lenses: the customer, the patient, the student, the member, the employee, the citizen. We explore alternative futures, test “what if” scenarios, and name the tensions that keep us from seeing the root causes.
This process transforms insight into alignment. It surfaces competing assumptions before they become friction points later. It creates shared language around the real work to be done.
Reframing isn’t an abstract exercise. It’s a disciplined act of empathy and systems thinking that sharpens focus and prevents the team from executing beautifully on the wrong problem.
Design Alignment Rituals
The written plan and the elaborate communication announcement don’t align people. Processes do. Operational leaders often struggle to spend sufficient time working collaboratively on long term problems, away from the urgent issues that crowd their calendars. And they can view the process of engagement and decision making as waste.
Traditional tools like prioritization, goal setting, and action planning become powerful — but only if they’re done as shared experiences, not spreadsheet exercises. This process is work, not waste.
At Shift, we design what we call alignment rituals — structured workshops and recurring practices that translate ideas into behavior. These might include:
- Strategy sprints that unite cross-functional teams around concrete “What-Must-Be-True” statements.
- Leadership retreats that blend storytelling with prioritization.
- Interactive “gallery walks” where teams visualize trade-offs and choose focus areas together.
- Action-planning sessions that close with visible commitments, not just checklists.
These rituals create ownership, accelerate learning, and make collaboration habitual. They turn strategy execution from a management process into a social one where every participant becomes a steward of the shift.
Align Incentives and Narratives
Even the most inspired plan falters if old incentives remain.
We work with leadership teams to examine how performance metrics, recognition, resource allocation, and core values reinforce or contradict the new direction. At the same time, we help shape the internal storytelling that sustains belief. The stories leaders tell — about wins, challenges, and moments of courage — become the culture’s operating system.
Data informs, but stories transform.
Sustain Momentum Through Meaning
Change doesn’t stick through compliance; it sticks through community.
Shift helps organizations build feedback loops — pulse surveys, learning labs, and structured reflection — that keep strategy alive and adaptive. We integrate stories to keep teams connected to purpose.
As Martin Reeves of BCG has noted, the most resilient organizations balance efficiency with imagination. Sustaining change means continually revisiting the question, “What does success mean now?” and allowing the answer to evolve.
The Human Imperative
At every level, strategy comes down to belief: what people believe about their organization, their colleagues, and themselves. You can’t dictate belief, but you can design for it. You create the conditions for people to see themselves in the future you’re describing.
Organizations don’t change through plans. They change through people. And people don’t change because they’re told to. They change because something moved them.
That’s the work of Shift Group: helping leaders design strategy that moves people — not just on paper, but in practice.
Because strategy is human.
Author’s Note:
This article introduces Shift Group Consulting’s foundational philosophy: that strategy execution succeeds only when organizations treat behavior change as the true unit of transformation. Future Insights pieces will explore each stage of the Shift Method in depth — from ethnographic discovery to behavior-aligned execution.
