Tackling Strategy Theater - Fractals To The Rescue (Yet Again)

Are your strategic themes gathering dust like unused New Year’s resolutions? If you’re investing significant energy evaluating initiatives but your enterprise themes seem vague, unconnected, merely decorative, or too restrictive, you might suffer from “Strategy Theater.”

The frameworks these organizations use prescribe a strategy artifact. But the leadership team responsible for it has not yet learned how to make that artifact useful for steering real work.

So they define an OKR or Strategic Theme the way they always have.

Like our Epics, Features, Stories or whatever artifact you use in your product delivery organization, we’d like our strategy to clarify why now, where we want to play, and how we will win, in a way that enables aligned autonomy.

Portfolio leaders at a firm I’m working with were doing great work bringing outcome-oriented and evidence-informed steering to the initiative level. We recognized that the strategic themes could benefit from the same improvement. It was beautiful to see Portfolio Managers starting to challenge themselves and their peers to bring more outcome orientation and optionality to their enterprise’s strategy artifacts.

Think about how the same patterns repeat at different organizational scales. Your delivery teams run experiments with stories, your product teams with features, and your portfolios with epics. Why stop the pattern there?

• A Strategy Owner can be to a strategic theme what an Epic Owner is to an epic and what a Product Owner is to a Product

• A Strategy Hypothesis could be to Strategies what an Epic Hypothesis is to epic-level initiatives.

• A Strategies Kanban can bring discipline and realistic flow consideration to strategic thinking, like the Portfolio Kanban brings to initiative-level work. It can manage the lifecycle of potential strategies - from sensing a strategic threat or opportunity to responding to it.

This isn’t about adding complexity - it’s about extending what already works with minimal addition.

How are you currently developing your strategic themes? The useful test is whether they help leaders make better tradeoff decisions, or whether they mostly decorate the planning process.