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Strategy isn’t just about planning—it’s about preparing to meet the future, to shape it, and not just react to what comes our way. In complex conditions, organizations that invest in clear thinking are the ones that perform better, adapt faster, and lead with confidence.

Why Strategy Making Matters

Strategy is an intentional, designed process for determining what to focus on and how to achieve what you want. It accounts for the context you’re in at present, what you’re evolving into, and the resources required to undertake what you’re looking to accomplish.

The process of creating a strategy and building the conditions for successful implementation is called strategic design. These enablers include developing tools and processes for feedback, learning, and adaptation that enable a strategy to survive in living systems. After all, our organizations, communities, and markets are all part of dynamic ecosystems of activity and influence, so our strategy needs to be suited to these.

Among the biggest criticisms of strategic plans is that they are static and don’t account for or enable change in complex environments. Strategic design addresses this limitation by creating adaptive frameworks rather than rigid plans.

The Investment Case for Strategy

Strategy making involves marshalling some of the most valued resources within your organization: time, focus, leadership capital, and money. The return on those investments is significant.

A strategy-making process asks: how will you set yourself up to win? By “win” I mean accomplish your mission, which includes creating an organization that can survive and thrive through complexity.

Roger Martin’s concept of playing to win emphasizes that strategy is not about playing it safe or simply surviving—it’s about making clear, integrated choices that position your organization to achieve meaningful success. In his framework (developed with A.G. Lafley of P&G), winning means defining what success looks like for your organization, where you will compete, and how you will win there. It’s a call to be bold, decisive, and intentional—strategy as a set of choices made in service of a defined goal, not just a plan or process.

Four Key Returns on Strategy Investment

1. Clarity and Alignment

A good strategy provides clarity in your purpose, direction, and the conditions in which you operate. This means bringing into focus what you do, how you do (or intend to do) what you do, the resources you have (or need), and the steps required to get to where you want to go.

This alignment has tangible value. McKinsey research shows that there is a 1.9 times increased likelihood of achieving above-median financial performance when the top team works together toward a common vision¹.

Alignment also creates coherence in your organization. It ensures that people’s energy is focused in the same direction, reducing unnecessary duplication, miscommunication, and wasted efforts while better channeling organizational resources.

2. Better Decisions, Faster

Strategy enables better prioritization under uncertainty and disruption. A strategic design process (different from just a strategic plan) fosters scenario planning, risk anticipation, and structured experimentation. This enables leaders to respond to change quickly because when change occurs, they have already envisioned ways to address the unexpected by training their mind and focus.

It’s not about predicting the future, but anticipating possible outcomes and developing a way of thinking and acting that can sit within this range of possibilities.

This approach avoids expensive missteps, allows early course correction, and encourages timely pivots. It’s also a way to ensure that decisions and actions are aligned with a pathway, not just arbitrary.

3. Resource and People Engagement

A good strategy engages the resources within your organization—material, cognitive, and human talent. On the talent side, we know that contribution is one of the primary factors underlying job satisfaction and performance. People also stay when they know where the organization is going and how they can contribute meaningfully to something bigger than themselves.

As a leader, your strategy will also help you better clarify what you have and what you need to get things done. Personnel inventories can help with this process through the personal inventory method.

On the cost side, a good strategy builds internal culture and cohesion, leading to long-term cost savings in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity.

4. Increased Innovation Capacity

Innovation is creating something new that has value—it’s putting your ideas into practice. Innovation might be needed to adapt or survive (like public health units rapidly changing their procurement models or staffing deployments at the onset of a pandemic), as a means to gain an advantage over competitors, or simply to meet an unmet need.

Strategic thinking opens space for intentional, not accidental, innovation. Without a strategy, innovation is scattershot (or non-existent) and unscalable.

Resilience in the Face of Complexity

Strategy is about being the best at what you can, creating positive impact, and enabling sustainable evolution. As we discussed in a previous post, strategy isn’t a plan. It’s not tactics, either. When undertaken as strategic design, a strategy enables organizations to thrive within living systems, rather than be subject to the whims of complexity.

Strategic design helps organizations navigate complexity with intention—not just react. Adaptive strategies reduce costs tied to disruption, crisis management, or failed change efforts. The cost of not preparing for complexity far outweighs the investment in strategic foresight.

Looking Forward

Strategy making is a crucial investment for organizations seeking to thrive in complex environments. By focusing on clarity, decision-making capability, resource engagement, and innovation capacity, strategic design creates the conditions for sustainable success.

Cense helps organizations with strategic thinking through strategic design. If you want to discuss your needs and explore how we can help you organize a strategy for more health and impact, let’s chat.

References:

1. Keller, Scott, and Mary Meaney. “High-performing teams: A timeless leadership topic.” McKinsey & Company, June 28, 2017. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/high-performing-teams-a-timeless-leadership-topic