Three myths about strategy refreshes
Hey, it’s strategy refresh season! Some organizations started 2021 by pausing to reflect on their strategy, but maybe you’ve gotten halfway through the year without making that space.
What’s holding you back? Oh—is it the challenges of balancing remote work, budget crunches, childcare demands, living through a global pandemic, and the crushing mental and physical health effects of the above? Right.
There’s little my humble post here can do about those, unless a bit of encouragement can make you feel a less alone in facing those challenges.
But if you’re thinking it’s now time to step back and review what you’ve been doing and what you need to do next, then I’m definitely here for you. I want to make the idea of doing a strategy refresh (or update, or review, or whatever other framing you prefer) feel a little less intimidating and a little more worthwhile.
Let’s dispel a few myths.
Myth #1 - You’ve gotta “go big or go home” when revisiting your strategy.
There are lots of pieces to the strategy puzzle 🧩 : vision, mission, strategy, tactics, culture, staffing, funding, operations, and on and on. They’re all intertwined. So it feels like if you tweak one, you’d better tackle them all or risk losing alignment.
This can easily make it feel like any process is going to be a heavy one 🏋️ : external consultations, internal kvetching, word-smithing, horse-trading — it all adds up.
Reality: Yes, the pieces need to align, but maybe only one of them is out of whack right now.
Maybe the vision still holds but the mission needs a tweak. Maybe they’re both fine and the theory of change is too, but culture has lagged in the face of organizational growth, or the funding model is no longer fit-for-purpose.
Bottomline: Decide what to tackle and focus on that.
Is it still a “strategy process” if it only focuses a few pieces of the puzzle? It can be. But if it doesn’t feel right calling it that, then call it something else—while maintaining a strategic lens.
Then, right-size the process for the need. Scale it up or down as appropriate.
I worked with one organization whose “multi-year implementation planning” included a reframing of their theory of change and core pillars of work. It was clearly a strategic process, but calling it “implementation planning” helped to ease staff and partner anxieties, and lower stakeholder expectations, about how much would change.
Myth #2 - Doing strategy means hiring strategy consultants.
The worry is always that consultants suck up time ⏱️ and money 💰, as well as introduce a new voice that may not know the organizational history. Both dynamics can lead to a heavier process than you intended.
Reality: Lots of consultants (🙋) believe “less is more” and don’t want to be involved more than necessary.
What you really need is a strategy facilitator, i.e. someone focused on the process (who may or may not be the one facilitating workshops or other sessions). That person can be internal to your organization. I’ve often told teams that they shouldn’t bring in an outsider. The process lives or dies on internal leadership anyway. If you’re considering a light-weight process, consider managing it yourselves. It also provides a great opportunity to build your team’s strategic muscles. 💪
Where outsiders bring real value is through added capacity, facilitation expertise, knowledge of what peers are doing, and a more neutral view of the results. Neutrality is especially valuable in larger organizations where teams have vested interests in certain lines of work. (But in those cases, bring someone in for neutrality rather than as cover for difficult leadership decisions—you’ve got to make the difficult calls anyway, so why pretend otherwise?)
Myth #3 - Your strategy time horizon 🌅 equals your strategy cycle length 🔄 .
That is: if you have a 5-year strategy, then you should revisit it in 5 years (or maybe in 4.5 years so you’ll be ready). This one isn’t a myth so much as an insidiously unexamined norm. Do not fall for it.
Reality: You should revisit your strategy before it expires. Long before.
The horizon is the length of the strategy you set (i.e. a “2021–2025 Strategy” has a 5-year time horizon). By definition and design, the horizon is the farthest point you can see. The strategy you set is most closely tailored to the current year and the future as you project it at that moment: the closer you get to the horizon, the more your projections will diverge from reality. Waiting that long means letting your strategy atrophy to its most irrelevant point.
Instead, most review the strategy on a shorter cycle with a “mid-cycle review”.
But why stop there? If you want to get more radical: switch to a rolling cycle where you revisit it every year (or every other year, if that feels more appropriate for the pace of your work) and push the horizon out each time. Your 2021–25 strategy rolls right into a 2022–26 strategy, then a 2023–27 strategy, and so on.
Heresy, you say? Too much work, you worry? Only if each iteration gets the same intensity that you’d otherwise be investing once every five years. Instead, spread that out and lower the stakeholder expectations for each iteration.
That might defy the expectations of your board or funders, but the whole point of dispelling these myths is help you be more strategic. Too often, strategy processes are designed to fit someone else’s ideas of what strategy should be or how it should work. Instead, re-design the process so it supports learning, alignment, decisions, and impact. The rest can follow from that.
(Want more on this topic? See “Eight Practices for Strategic Agility” in SSIR—feel free to contact me on if you want the ungated version.)
