How do we stop our strategy drifting away from what teams actually work on? You stop strategic drift – the slow separation of your strategy and your teams’ work – by steering the strategy, not just setting it. Drift isn’t a communication failure, and a big re-plan or restructure won’t fix it. What fixes it is an operating model for steering strategy: a regular rhythm of reviews, conversations and shared artefacts around a single visible strategy, with everyone taking part.
I see the same pattern in many leadership teams. The strategy is clear on paper. Everyone around the table could recite it. And yet when you look at what teams are working on this week, the connection is surprisingly hard to find.
What is strategic drift?
The term comes from Gerry Johnson. It grew out of his research into how strategy develops incrementally (Johnson, 1988). Describing his findings, he wrote that “the incrementally adjusted strategic changes, and the environmental, particularly market changes, moved apart.” Later, the Exploring Strategy textbook popularised the idea. There, strategic drift describes strategies that develop gradually, shaped by history and culture, but “fail to keep pace with a changing environment”.
Johnson located the cause in the organisation itself. The taken-for-granted assumptions that made an organisation successful also filter what it notices. So the strategy evolves, just not as fast as the world around it, and the gap widens without anyone deciding to let it.
External and internal strategic drift
In Johnson’s sense, then, drift is the strategy moving away from the market. The question I hear from leadership teams is usually about something else, which is the strategy and the work moving apart. I find it helps to treat both as strategic drift, and to name them separately.
External drift is when the strategy no longer fits the environment. This is Johnson’s drift.
Internal drift is when the day-to-day work no longer reflects the strategy.
They look like different problems, but in my experience, they are closely connected. When the strategy and the work drift apart, the strategy stops getting useful feedback from the work. Without that feedback, there is no way of noticing that the strategy is also drifting away from the market. So internal drift ends up hiding external drift. The two share a root cause, and the same fix works for both.
Henry Mintzberg’s distinction between deliberate and emergent strategy adds a useful twist (Mintzberg and Waters, 1985). What teams are actually working on is, in Mintzberg’s terms, the organisation’s realised strategy. So internal drift isn’t always the work going wrong. Sometimes it is the work responding to something the strategy hasn’t caught up with yet, which is exactly the kind of external signal Johnson warned that organisations miss.
Signs of strategic drift
Strategic drift rarely announces itself. These are the things leaders tend to tell me first, usually with some frustration.
- “The leadership team is aligned, but people elsewhere can’t tell me what the strategy means for their work.”
- “Everyone is busy, and the dashboards are green, so why aren’t we moving on the things we said mattered?”
- “We keep starting new initiatives, but we never finish anything.”
- “The strategy only really comes up at the offsite and in the board pack.”
- “Every clash over priorities ends up on my desk.”
- “Teams are working on things we never asked for, and I can’t tell whether that’s a problem or an insight.”
None of these means people aren’t trying. More often they mean the opposite. Capable people are making sensible local decisions, without a shared and current picture of what the strategy needs from them.
Why strategic drift happens
One usual diagnosis is communication. Leaders didn’t explain the strategy clearly enough, so the remedy is a better deck or a firmer cascade. The other usual remedy is structural, which tends to mean a re-plan or a reorganisation.
Both can help for a while. Neither lasts, because neither changes how often the strategy actually meets the work.
Most organisations set their strategy once, typically at an annual offsite, and then have no regular way to run it. The document is still there, and it may even be quoted now and then. It simply stops being revisited, because revisiting it has no home.
I’ve written about how this happens in How Delivery Starves Strategy in Successful Organisations. Delivery has a rhythm, quick signals and a permanent place in the calendar. Strategy usually has none of those. So it loses the competition for attention, one reasonable meeting at a time, and the best-run organisations are often the most exposed.
This is also why the two kinds of strategic drift travel together. A strategy that people only look at once a year can’t keep pace with the market, and it can’t keep pace with the work either. Once it has lost touch with the work, it has also lost the feedback that would tell it the market had moved.
How to stop your strategic drift
Johnson closed his paper by arguing for “the continued development of models which more precisely explain both strategy formulation and implementation” in terms of how organisations actually act. Nearly forty years on, I think of Continuous Strategy as one practical answer to that. It treats setting a strategy and implementing it as one continuous conversation, rather than two separate events.
Continuous Strategy is an operating model for running your strategy. By that I mean the organisation’s capability to run it: the cadences, interactions and artefacts around a shared X-Matrix, along with the decision rights, governance and structure that support them. It builds on what is more generally known as Strategy Deployment, and four parts of it matter most for strategic drift.
Make the strategy visible
The TASTE X-Matrix puts a whole strategy on one page: True North, Aspirations, Strategies, Tactics and Evidence. It also shows how they relate to each other. Once the strategy fits on a single page that everyone can see, strategic drift becomes something you can point at. A strategy that no tactic implements might indicate an intention nobody is funding. A tactic that links to no strategy might indicate work that belongs to a different conversation.
Treat tactics as hypotheses
Tactics are how you implement the strategy. Each one is a bet that doing this will move us towards that, so each needs Evidence that shows whether it’s working. Evidence is a leading indicator. It tells you a tactic is struggling while there is still time to change it, rather than leaving you to find out at the year-end review.
Pass it back and forth
Catchball is how ideas move between leadership and teams, with each side catching a proposal, reflecting on it, improving it, and passing it on. Backbriefing is where a team plays back what it has understood and what it plans to do. That catches a team’s misreading early, and it catches leadership’s own blind spots just as often. It’s also where people notice external drift. The people closest to customers see the market moving first, and catchball gives that signal a route back to the strategy, rather than leaving it to surface as unexplained work.
Give it a rhythm
None of this works as a one-off. In Continuous Strategy Made Simple, I describe four loops. Planning is annual and sets the direction. Steering is quarterly, and it is the loop that looks at the strategy itself rather than the work beneath it. Reviewing is monthly, for the people running the tactics. Refreshing is close to continuous, and often isn’t a meeting at all.
If you only do one thing, give the strategy a monthly hour in the calendar, with people who can actually change something. It’s the first step towards a strategy that is reviewed and refreshed continuously, with everyone taking part, rather than waiting for next year’s offsite.
This doesn’t replace how you already work. It sits alongside OKRs, Agile, or whatever else you use.
What else you might need to know
How this differs from OKRs
OKRs and the X-Matrix work well together, but they do different jobs. OKRs are good at setting and tracking goals. The X-Matrix also captures the strategies and tactics behind those goals, and how they connect, which is where strategic drift tends to hide. I’ve written more about this in Combining OKRs and the X-Matrix.
How long it takes to see a difference
Building a first X-Matrix with a leadership team usually takes a few weeks, and that alone tends to bring disagreements into the open. The first quarterly steering review is where you start to see whether the work and the strategy are converging. The bigger change is a habit, and habits take a few cycles to form.
Why you don’t need to restructure first
Strategic drift is a problem of rhythm rather than structure. Decision rights, governance, and structure all support the operating model, and they may need to change over time. But they work better as something you adjust once you can see where the strategy and the work are pulling apart, rather than as a starting point.
When internal drift is a good sign
When teams drift towards work nobody asked for, they are sometimes responding to something real that the strategy hasn’t noticed yet. Rather than stamping that out, give it a regular conversation where it can surface, so you can decide whether to bring the work back to the strategy or move the strategy towards the work.
A real example: Rally Software
I saw this work at Rally Software, where I was an Agile coach in the Office of the CTO. Between 2010 and 2014, Rally grew from a few hundred people to more than 500. It already ran Strategy Deployment, but the people who shaped the strategy were the ones in the room, and they were a shrinking share of the company.
So in 2013 Rally added the X-Matrix. A two-day Annual Planning event brought together around 80 people, about 70 staff and 10 invited customers. Together they agreed on no more than four strategies and the top ten cross-departmental initiatives to implement them, each tied to measures of progress. Teams then revised their plans every quarter as results came in, and Quarterly Steering reviewed them against the X-Matrix.
The result was that everyone in the company could see the work on one page, along with why it mattered and how Rally would measure progress. The page helped, but what kept the strategy and the work connected was that people built it together and kept coming back to it. You can read the full story in the Rally Software X-Matrix case study.
Talk through your strategy
If your strategy is clear on paper but you’re seeing signs of strategic drift, I’d be happy to help you work out where the gap is and where to start. Let’s talk through your strategy.