Nobody Reads the Strategy Deck
You spent three months on the strategy. The board loved it. The town hall went well. And now it's sitting in a SharePoint folder that nobody has opened since.
Here’s something I’ve seen enough times to call it a pattern: a leadership team spends months crafting a strategy. Workshops, offsites, consultant inputs, multiple drafts. The final deck is 47 slides of carefully worded ambition. It gets presented at a town hall. People nod. And then it vanishes.
Six months later, you ask a team lead what the strategy is. They’ll give you something vaguely adjacent, maybe a theme they remember from the town hall, or a priority they’ve inferred from what’s being funded. But the actual strategy? The one in the deck? Nobody’s looked at it since the launch.
This isn’t a communication problem. Or rather, it is, but not the kind that more communication fixes.
The deck is an artefact of the process, not the strategy
The 47-slide deck exists because the strategy process needed a deliverable. Something to present, something to approve, something to point to when someone asks “do we have a strategy?” The answer is yes, it’s right there, slide 23.
But a deck is a terrible container for strategy. Strategy is about choices: what you’re going to do and, critically, what you’re not going to do. Decks are about comprehensiveness. They cover everything so nobody feels left out. By the time you’ve made sure every division, function, and initiative is represented, you haven’t described a strategy. You’ve described the entire organisation with some aspirational adjectives attached.
What actually travels
In the organisations where strategy actually reaches the people doing the work, it almost never travels via the deck. It travels through:
Stories. A CEO who can tell a two-minute story about why the company is making a particular bet, and what it means for the person listening, will outperform any deck.
Decisions. When people see leadership say no to something profitable because it doesn’t fit the strategy, they learn more about the strategy in that moment than in any town hall.
Constraints. “We don’t do that anymore” is clearer than any vision statement. Constraints are memorable. They’re actionable. And they propagate through an organisation without needing a change management programme.
The test
Want to know if your strategy is working? Don’t check whether people have read the deck. Ask three people from different levels of the organisation: “What are we trying to do, and why?” If you get three roughly compatible answers, your strategy is alive. If you get three different stories, it doesn’t matter how good the deck is.
The work isn’t in writing the strategy. It’s in making it legible enough that a team lead three layers down can make a Tuesday afternoon decision that’s consistent with it. That’s the hard part. And no deck has ever solved it.