Somebody once said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. People often attribute the line to Drucker, though the attribution is doubtful. What is not in doubt is how well it travelled. As a result, there have been several variations, such as technology eats strategy, and lately execution eats strategy. I think the verb is wrong, however. I think delivery starves strategy.
JP Castlin has already written about that last variation (paid subscriber post, but highly recommended), and I think he is right. Execution cannot eat strategy because execution cannot exist outside strategy to begin with. A business that does not know why it is doing one thing rather than another will spread itself thin until the money runs out. He prefers to ask whether execution should enforce a plan or enable adaptation.
I want to make the same point from a different direction. If nothing eats your strategy, what does happen to it?
Eating implies a contest
If something ate your strategy, several things follow.
There was a contest, and it had a winner. There was a moment when it happened, even if nobody can say when. And there is a culprit, because eating is something one party does to another.
That last implication does the damage, because it sets the search going. Once you believe someone has eaten your strategy, you look for the person or thing who ate it. It was the culture. Or it was the delivery organisation, too busy shipping to think. Perhaps the middle managers were insufficiently strategic. Or maybe it was the teams, insufficiently aligned.
In different organisations, I have heard someone propose each of those in turn, and the proposers were generally describing something real. What none of them was describing was a cause.
We only learned the lesson once
However, what I see happens most often in organisations that are actually good at what they do.
Over the last couple of decades we learned something genuinely valuable, which is that delivery is not an event. It is a capability, and you can build it, measure it, and improve it without ever reaching a finish. The Agile movement disciplines grew up around that idea, and Agile methods work.
We never applied the same lesson to strategy. Strategy stayed what it had always been, which is a thing a few people produce once a year and everybody else runs against until the next time. That habit is exactly what I was arguing against when I started calling it Continuous Strategy rather than Strategy Deployment.
Attention follows visibility
The two now sit at different speeds, and the reason they do is visibility. Delivery produces signals quickly. A build breaks, a deployment fails, a lead time drifts, a burn-up flattens, and every one of those is concrete and attributable. A strategic choice does nothing of the sort. It pays back in many months or even years, tangled up with numerous other causes, usually after the people who made it have moved on. When a strategy is wrong, nothing turns red, because the dashboard is measuring the work rather than the direction.
So attention follows visibility, and so do expertise and reward. For decades, the problems that visibly paid off were nearly all delivery problems, so that is where the good people went, and that is what the organisation learned to do well.
Meanwhile, the strategic question has no recurring meeting or cadence, and no measure that would ever go amber. It is abstract and unanswerable this week. Set against a well-run delivery rhythm, it loses every time, and it loses in the calendar rather than in an argument.
There is no moment when delivery starves strategy
This is why I prefer to say that delivery starves strategy. Delivery did not take strategy’s place in a single sitting. It took the time and attention strategy needed, and then the forums where direction gets decided, one useful meeting at a time, until there was nothing left.
No one decided any of that. Every individual meeting that displaced the strategic conversation was a reasonable meeting about real work. Which is why, when you go looking for the culprit, you cannot find one, and why nobody feels responsible for a loss that happened collectively.
What makes the loss so hard to notice is that the strategy document is often still there. It is still sometimes laminated and still occasionally quoted. The approach was never overturned or argued down. It simply stopped being revisited, because revisiting it had no home.
Which verb you pick decides what you do next
I think this is relevant because whether you think delivery eats strategy, or delivery starves strategy, sends you in different directions.
If your strategy was eaten, the remedies are disciplinary. Restrain the thing that ate it. Demand that people be more strategic. Cascade the plan harder and hold the teams to it. Most of the strategy interventions I have been asked to help with started life as one of those.
If delivery starves strategy, none of that applies, because there is nothing to restrain and nobody to correct. The question becomes what strategy was never given in the first place. Where in the calendar does the strategic question live? Who owns it between planning cycles? What would have to happen for somebody to raise a hand and say the direction looks wrong? What would ever turn red on a strategy rather than on the work beneath it?
That last one is the question I find most revealing. It is also why the X-Matrix has a section for Evidence rather than targets. Evidence is the leading indicator that says something about whether a strategy is working while there is still time to do something about it. Without anything playing that role, the only feedback a strategy ever gets is the annual verdict on whether it happened.
The rest of the answers are about rhythm rather than insight. A strategy that gets looked at monthly by the people in a position to change it is worth more than a better strategy that gets looked at every October. I have written before about what those cadences might look like, and the monthly review is the one that matters most here.
The organisations most exposed are the impressive ones
This is the part that is hardest to say to a leadership team without it sounding like a criticism.
The organisations most at risk are not the struggling ones. In a struggling organisation, the absence of direction causes chaos that others notice. In a delivery-excellent organisation, it shows up as nothing at all. The teams ship. The dashboards stay green. The retrospectives are thoughtful. Nothing is on fire, so nobody reaches for the alarm, and the drift goes on for years while everybody involved does good work.
The same excellence that would carry a real strategy a long way will also hide the absence of one. That is not a failure of the people. It is what happens when one half of an organisation becomes a capability, and the other half stays an artefact.
What to do when delivery starves strategy
Feeding strategy starts smaller than people expect.
It does not begin with a new operating model or a redesigned planning process. It begins with the strategic question getting somewhere to live. That might just be a recurring hour, with a small group who can actually change something, and a way of knowing whether the current direction is still the right one.
There is much more to it than that, and the ten qualities of Continuous Strategy describe what a healthy version looks like once it is running. However, none of those qualities can develop in a strategy that nobody returns to. That hour is what starts to separate execution that enables adaptation from execution that enforces a plan.
An hour a month is not much of a meal. But it is more than most strategies are getting.