Strategy Models Are Indispensable
Models are essential to help teams organize and understand complexity. They create shared language and clarify how essential processes relate to one another.
But every model simplifies reality. And when we rely on simplification too heavily, we risk flattening the very elements that determine whether strategy succeeds in practice.
Models privilege factors that can be categorized and measured. What they tend to underrepresent are the less predictable features of organizational life: the humans who must interpret, believe and act.
Optimizing our models for clarity and communication doesn’t guarantee completeness in implementation. And incomplete implementation is one reason why many strategies fail.
What Models Cannot Capture
Our brains are wired to simplify complex information or instructions. Models are one way we do that. They’re efficient, structured short cuts to help us sift through, understand, prioritize, and act upon ambiguous signals. But every shortcut carries blind spots.
To simplify a complex process, something must be left out. In strategy models, what is often left out is the less visible, less controllable, and predictable participants in the model: the humans.
Research in behavioral economics has repeatedly demonstrated that people do not behave as fully rational actors. Yet many strategy models implicitly imply that they do, that incentives are clear, decisions are linear, and actions follow logically from instructions. The models are mostly deterministic in nature: implement these steps in this order and get a predictable result. And though I recommend many of the same command-and-control processes and accountability measures to my clients, I know that by themselves they are insufficient.
Strategy models engage the analytical mind, and they bring structure and order. But leading people through change depends on them making sense of it by ascribing meaning, seeding belief, and connecting to their identity. When strategy engages only logic and not conviction, it may secure compliance, but it will fail to inspire commitment.
Engaging The Human Element
Strategies that push teams outside their historic patterns implicitly ask the team to become something different. If that identity shift is not acknowledged, the system will resist, out of self-preservation.
People don’t merely execute strategy. They interpret it through a lens of who they believe they are. They need to see themselves – as they are and as they aspire to become – in the goals. Consumer brands figured this out decades ago. The difference between “I run” and “I am a runner” is not lost on companies like Nike. “I have an iPhone” is far less valuable than the identity statement, “I am an Apple person.” It’s literally worth hundreds of millions.
Values become powerful when they guide decisions. In distributed organizations, front-line staff and middle managers make hundreds of choices each day. Clearly defined and visibly modeled values function as guardrails, enabling autonomy while preventing drift.
When stated values diverge from observed executive behavior, trust hardens quickly. And once cynicism sets in, even well-designed strategies struggle to gain traction.
Get Started On the Deep Work
To engage beyond the model, and into the deeper work of implementation, executive teams might pause with questions like these:
To begin to engage at a level deeper than your models, and to get into the messy middle of your complex human organization, executives could consider starting here:.
- What assumptions are we making about ourselves and our organization that, left unspoken, may derail us?
- Who must we become as a leadership team for this strategy to succeed?
- Which of our stated values could meaningfully constrain this strategy, or which do we need to lean into more authentically to power our success?
- What behaviors must we, as executives, change to lead this shift credibly?
If you’re rethinking how strategy becomes lived behavior in your organization, I’d welcome a conversation.
