STRATEGY ALIGNMENT AND COMMITMENT

The problem is rarely the one you think

Leadership teams think their strategy problem is analytical, when it's usually one of alignment and ownership. They believe they need a better answer — more analysis, an outside expert, a sharper framework. But the pieces of the real answer are almost always already distributed around the table. What's missing is that the team has never surfaced where they actually disagree, never gotten honest about where they are — not just where they're going — and never done the human work of truly committing together. So they spin, polishing the parts they already agree on while the real gaps go untouched — or they outsource the decision to a consultant and never own it.

And it doesn't end at the decision. Strategies fail in execution for the same reason: a team that never thought together about the risks, the barriers, and what it will take to bring others along leaves the room with something too thin to act on — unclear on exactly what they chose, why they chose it, and what has to happen now. When it breaks downstream — when "the middle didn't execute" — they blame the answer, or the people who were handed the answer, and go looking for a better one. What was missing was never the perfection of the answer. It was the alignment, the ownership, the honest reckoning, and the readiness to act that only they could produce, and only together.

There's a simple test for whether you have it. If someone took the deck away, could the team still say the strategy — the destination, the chosen game, the logic for why you win? Could the next level use it to make decisions without you? If not, what you have isn't yet a strategy. It's a document.

How I think about getting a team aligned and committed

The convictions below share a starting point: a leadership team's strategy problem is rarely a shortage of answers. It's a shortage of alignment, clarity, and ownership around the answer that's largely already there. Everything I do in this work follows from that — surfacing where the team really disagrees, creating the conversations where they can hear each other and think together, co-designing a path forward that integrates what each of them sees, and returning the decision to the people who have to live with it.

The answer is usually already in the room. Sometimes a team genuinely needs an outside expert — data they can't get, analysis they can't do. More often, the pieces of the real answer are already spread across the leadership team, and the team reaches for a consultant anyway — to avoid the conflict, or out of a belief that some all-knowing third party holds a truth they don't. That belief is flattering to the consultant and corrosive to the team: it drains ownership and confidence, and most of what comes back is a generic rehash of other companies' strategies — rarely the novel thing that real winning requires. No one will ever know your business and its moment the way your team does. And being handed an answer never crosses the gap between knowing and doing — the gap where strategies actually die. My edge is that I've done the expert work and can read which issues matter and how to navigate them, while always returning the decision to the people who have to own it.

Strategy conversations are human conversations. This is the inverse of cohesion work: there, the team is the point and the business is the vehicle; here, the strategy is the point and the human work is what makes it reachable. But make no mistake — it is human work. People are biased; each leader is, in a sense, a focus group of one. Alignment and commitment aren't analytical outputs; they're closer to spiritual ones. Argument depends on trust — enough to say the thing that needs saying — and on listening, the kind that lets a group integrate rather than dissolve into everyone trying to convince everyone else. Much of the craft is designing the human packaging around the strategy conversations, then facilitating through it so the right conversations happen in the right way.

No single framework fits — the craft is designing the right one. Playing to Win, Porter, a dozen others — all carry real wisdom, none is sufficient, because what "strategy" requires varies enormously with a company's stage, its current state, and the tempo of its industry. In fast-moving environments, classical analysis often has to be compressed and embedded rather than run as a standalone process — less "a comprehensive multi-month study" and more "given everything we understand right now, what's our best game plan for the next few quarters?" I'm a devotee of no single method and a user of many, mixing and matching to build the approach this team needs at this moment.

Fish for the misalignment — before the room. The work starts before the offsite, by finding where the real gaps are. Misalignment announces itself: in what isn't working, where friction keeps repeating, which tactical moves aren't paying off. And it shows up when you ask people at more than one level — the next level often sees where the strategy is off in ways the top team, at its altitude, can't. I surface those gaps, frame them, and bring them into the room ready to be worked. The point isn't to polish what's already clear and agreed — it's to spend the team's scarce time only where clarity, alignment, commitment, and relevance are actually missing.

Get to "A" before you argue about "B." Every team wants to spend its time on where it's going. But the leaders are rarely on the same page about where they already are — and that unspoken gap quietly wrecks everything downstream. It's the blind men and the elephant: each leader's read of reality feels logical and fact-based, but it's built on their own vantage, their own information, their own theory of winning — each holding one true, partial part of the animal. Until each perspective and its logic is out in the open, heard, and assembled into a shared picture of the whole, there is nothing solid to align a strategy to. Get the team honestly to "A" — a shared, unflinching read of the present — and the choices about "B," the tradeoffs, the risks, and the commitment start to come within reach.

Typical Engagement Scenarios

• A consequential choice on the table. A pivot, a new market, a real where-to-play decision — the kind with genuine tradeoffs, where someone's preferred direction won't win, and the team has to choose together and mean it.

• A strategy that lives in the deck. There's a strategy on paper, but it isn't in the team's heads or their daily decisions. People can present it; they can't use it to say no to a good idea that doesn't fit.

• Friction that traces to an unspoken disagreement. Recurring cross-functional conflict, pricing logic that varies by deal, messaging that drifts by audience — symptoms of a strategic question the team never actually settled.

• Strategy as annual ritual. The planning cycle produces a deliverable everyone privately knows isn't real — numbers and templates standing in for the choices no one wanted to force.

What changes

The team can say the strategy in a few crisp sentences, without the deck — the destination, the chosen game, the logic for why it wins. The next level can use it to make decisions without escalating. Cross-functional conversations stop relitigating premises and start solving problems. The real tradeoffs get named and owned instead of hidden behind "and." And because the team reached it together, the decision holds under pressure rather than getting quietly relitigated the moment it's tested.

They also leave ready to move — not with a finished cascade, but with a shared read of the risks and what it will take, a high-level sense of the path, and the immediate next steps to get it started. That's the threshold where mobilizing the broader organization begins.

Case examples

[Case studies to come — short teasers linking to a separate case-studies page. e.g. "A strategy offsite that resolved a where-to-play choice under market-timing pressure →"]

How I approach this work —>