My direct boss was a senior partner, one of the best minds in the firm. Princeton, Harvard, and Michigan gave him academic credentials, but his skills working with leadership teams gave him credibility. By any external measure, he was exactly what a senior management consultant was supposed to be.

He also had a serious drinking problem. I’d seen it on business trips and late evenings in the office, which happened regularly in that world. I’d quietly suggest driving after a late dinner on more than one occasion.

I now understand this was more common than we thought at the time. A 1990 study found that roughly 18 percent of lawyers qualified as problem drinkers, nearly twice the national rate at the time. The consulting and financial services worlds were about the same. High-functioning professionals are often the last people anyone thinks have a problem because they’re still performing, billing, and winning business. The drinking stays hidden behind the competence until it doesn’t.

He and I had an unusual bond. We’d grown up within a mile of each other in a small Ohio town, a coincidence we discovered early on, and it created a kind of ease between us that didn’t exist in his other professional relationships. Which made what I was watching harder to ignore, and also harder to act on.

WHAT I WAS ACTUALLY WORRIED ABOUT

It wasn’t any single thing but an accumulation of signs and events.

I worried about his physical health first. Untreated alcohol abuse carries serious long-term health effects that compound over time, and he was already showing signs - flushed face, lapses in memory, and unexpected mood swings. I worried about what happened when his professional judgment was impaired, and the occasional volatility I’d seen that was unlike the man I knew sober. I worried about what it meant for younger people in the firm to watch a senior partner drink the way he drank, even though it was mostly after hours or at business social events.

And I worried about his marriage. Common sense (and now research) suggests that roughly half of divorces in households affected by alcoholism cite the drinking as the primary cause. I liked his wife, so that hit me in a way statistics don’t.

That was what I could see. What I didn’t know was how bad it was behind closed doors, whether my job would survive what I was considering doing, or whether the president of the firm would take my concerns seriously or dismiss them as the overreach of a junior employee with two years of experience trying to manage a senior partner.

That uncertainty is where most people stop. It’s where I almost stopped too. Faced with uncertainty, the safe path is to not decide, thus avoiding the unknown downside. However, for me, the pesky Boy Scout oath to be loyal, helpful, friendly,and brave and to do my duty pushed back against taking the safe path.

GOING TO THE TOP

I went to the president of the firm and told him my concerns and what I’d seen. I didn’t soften it or frame it strategically. I just described what I’d observed, on trips, in the office, in moments that had stayed with me. At the time, I thought he would take it from there and I’d be relieved of any further active role.

He listened without interrupting. When I finished, he said an intervention was the right move, and he asked me to be part of it. I said yes before I’d fully thought through what that meant.

The intervention was at the president’s home on a weekday evening. His wife was there. His direct superior was there. The president was there. And I was there, the only person in the room who reported directly to him, two full levels below senior leadership, three years into the working world.

He arrived last. When he walked in and saw the faces around the room, his eyes moved from person to person and stopped on me. He understood immediately that If I was there, I was the one who’d initiated this.

THE INTERVENTION

Each person in the room spoke. We told him we were worried. We told him we cared about him, which was true. The President told him that if he didn’t leave the meeting to go directly to a residential treatment program, he would have no job and no marriage to return to. Watching him leave and stand by his car for a long time before getting in made me more sad than grateful, but I was still fearful about my future because he would still be my direct supervisor.

Saying something like that to someone you respect, while he stares at you from across a room, is one of those experiences you don’t forget, either the images or the emotion. He was angry and frightened and somewhere in there, I’d like to hope, relieved. People who are struggling with addiction often know it before anyone else says it out loud.

The nearly one-month rehab program worked.

Our relationship was genuinely cold for a few years afterward. Civil in the hallways, nothing more. I understood it. I’d walked him into a room he hadn’t chosen and delivered an ultimatum in front of his wife and his superiors. Whatever gratitude he eventually felt, the immediate experience had to have been humiliating.

Then, some years later, he found a moment when we were alone and started a conversation. He told me that what I’d done had saved his marriage and probably his life, and that he’d known for a long time that it had taken real courage from someone who had very little job security to do it.

I’ve thought about that conversation often. It mattered more than I expected it to.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ACTING UNDER UNCERTAINTY

I was near the bottom of a 35-person firm I loved and respected. My boss was well-regarded by the president, and volatile enough that I genuinely didn’t know if my job would survive what I was about to do. I didn’t have the full picture of how serious the problem was. I’d never been involved in an intervention and didn’t know how it would land. I didn’t know if he’d get better or resent me for the rest of his career - or my short one.

What I had was a reasonably clear sense of what the situation required, independent of my own interests. Alcoholism is an illness, not a character flaw. It doesn’t improve by being managed around and driven home from. It required medical intervention, supported by family and peers. I knew that, but I also knew nobody else was going to move first.

I also later learned more about that situation than I did at the time. Research bears out something I came to understand from this experience: the old belief that someone needs to ‘hit bottom’ before they can be helped has largely been discredited. Early intervention, when someone is still high-functioning, still employed, still married, dramatically improves outcomes. While writing this article, my research found that the Association of Intervention Specialists puts professional intervention success rates in the 80 to 90 percent range. Waiting costs more than acting, in almost every dimension, whether medical or strategic.

Going back to your core values (not necessarily from the Boy Scouts!) is how you make the right call when the facts are incomplete and the comfortable choice is to wait.

The discipline I’ve tried to carry from that experience into everything since isn’t about certainty. It’s about knowing what you stand for clearly enough that you can act without it. When the information is incomplete and the easy move is to do nothing, your values are the only reliable navigation.

That’s as true in strategy work as it is in everything else. The hard calls rarely come with enough information, and that's what makes them yours to make.

Next week: The Alignment Illusion. Why leadership teams that agree in the meeting execute in opposite directions, and what genuine alignment actually requires.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more about Mark | Connect on LinkedIn

Ready to build a living strategy that keeps pace with your market - even when you don’t have enough information? Schedule a call.

A strategy says what we will do, what we will not do, why those choices hold under pressure, what would have to be true for them to succeed, what we’re watching to know when conditions are changing, and what we do when they break.

That’s not a semantic difference. It’s the difference between a document that guides decisions and a document that describes intentions. Most organizations have the second. They call it strategy. Their boards approve it. And nobody in the room notices the gap until the plan meets the market.

A plan answers: what will we do? A strategy answers: what will we do, what won’t we do, and why does the logic hold when things go wrong?

WHAT PLANS DO WELL

Plans are useful. Don’t mistake this for an argument against planning.

A good plan sequences actions, allocates resources, assigns accountability, and sets timelines. It makes execution visible. Without a plan, strategy is aspiration with no mechanism. The initiative stays on the whiteboard. The insight never becomes behavior.

The problem isn’t planning. It’s treating a plan as if it were a strategy. When that happens, the organization has actions without logic. Initiatives without choices. Progress toward objectives that were never tested against reality.

And when something changes, which it always does, the team has no framework for deciding what to hold and what to adjust. They go back to the plan. They manage the plan. They protect the plan. Meanwhile, the conditions the plan was built on have shifted underneath it.

WHAT STRATEGY ADDS

Strategy adds four things a plan doesn’t contain.

Explicit choices. Not just what we’ll pursue but what we’re specifically declining. A strategy that doesn’t foreclose options isn’t a strategy. It’s a list of good ideas. Real choices have costs, and those costs should be visible.

Tested logic. The conditions that must hold for the strategy to succeed, named rather than assumed. This is the WWHTBT work we covered in the spring. A plan assumes things will work. A strategy names what has to be true and distinguishes what’s been validated from what’s still open.

Signposts. Leading indicators that tell the team when conditions are shifting before the results show it. A plan tracks outcomes. A strategy watches signals. The difference determines whether you adjust while you still have room to move or after the window has closed.

A response logic. What the organization does when a key assumption fails. Not a contingency plan for every scenario, but a clear picture of what’s most likely to break and what the response would be. Teams that have thought through this in advance move faster when it happens.

None of those four things show up in a typical strategic plan. Which is why most strategic plans fail, not because the initiatives were wrong but because nobody built the logic underneath them.

WHERE BOARDS GET STUCK

Boards are trained to evaluate plans. They review the objectives, assess the financials, probe the assumptions at a high level, and approve or redirect. That’s legitimate governance work.

But most boards can’t tell whether what they’re looking at is a strategy or a well-organized list of things management intends to do. The presentation looks the same. The language sounds similar. The slide that says ‘strategic priorities’ could be describing actual strategic choices or it could be describing a collection of departmental wish lists assembled into a coherent-looking document.

The test is simple and almost never applied: can the board articulate what the organization has decided not to do?

A strategy has costs. It excludes things. It says no to markets, customers, capabilities, and initiatives that might otherwise be worth pursuing. If the board can’t name what’s been excluded, the choices haven’t been made. The document is a plan.

Ask any board member to describe what the organization has decided not to do. The answer tells you whether the board is overseeing a strategy or approving a wish list.

A STORY WORTH TELLING

A $30M DMV nonprofit went through a formal strategic planning process. Seven months of work, an external consultant, board retreats, and leadership team offsite. The output: a 34-page strategic plan with six priorities, each with its own initiatives, timelines, and success metrics.

Simple question to the board chair: Which of these six priorities would the organization drop if resource constraints could fund only four?

No good answer. Not because he wasn’t thoughtful. Because the plan hadn’t forced that choice. All six priorities had survived the process because the process optimized for consensus rather than decision. Every constituency got its priority preserved. Nobody had to say no to anything. This is human pressure to protect turf and understandable.

That’s a plan. A well-researched, professionally facilitated, beautifully formatted plan. And when the federal funding environment shifted the following year and the organization did have to make hard choices, they were making them for the first time under pressure, without the shared logic they would have had if the choices had been made explicitly during the planning process.

The cost of that gap showed up eighteen months later. It was entirely avoidable.

THE ONE-PAGE TEST

In the May 5 Snapshot issue, we covered the one-page CEO Summary, SPRINT’s final deliverable. The constraint of one page forces the choices to be explicit. You can’t fit everything. Deciding what makes the page and what doesn’t is the strategy work.

The same logic applies to board presentations. A strategy that requires sixty slides to explain is probably a plan. A strategy that can be explained clearly in five minutes, with the choices and the logic visible, is closer to the real thing.

The board’s job is to engage with the logic, not the volume. Directors who ask ‘why did you choose this over that?’ are doing governance. Directors who ask ‘how confident are you in this projection?’ are reviewing a plan.

Both questions matter. But only one of them tells you whether the organization has a strategy.

YOUR MOVE THIS WEEK

Take your current strategic plan and apply three questions.

First: what has the organization specifically decided not to do? Not things you can’t afford. Things you’ve chosen not to pursue. If the list is empty or vague, the choices haven’t been made.

Second: what are the two or three conditions that most need to hold for the strategy to succeed, and what’s your current confidence level in each?

Third: what would the first visible signal be that one of those conditions is starting to fail?

If the plan answers the first question clearly and the second and third don’t exist anywhere in the document, you have a plan. Building the second and third is what turns it into a strategy.

That work isn’t done in the planning process. It’s done in the strategy process. They’re different disciplines, and the distinction is worth making before the market makes it for you.

Next week: The Alignment Illusion. Why leadership teams that agree in the meeting execute in opposite directions, and what real alignment actually requires.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more about Mark | Connect on LinkedIn

Ready to build a living strategy that keeps pace with your market? Schedule a call.

Most consultants will never write the next sentence, so I will. A lot of the time, you don’t.

The question nobody asks first

When a CEO calls me, the pressure on them is already built in. To them, something feels off, maybe the board is restless, or a number is heading in the wrong direction. The instinct is to bring in help. But hiring a strategy consultant is itself a strategic choice, and like any choice, it can be wrong. The honest first move isn’t to scope a project. It’s to figure out whether you have a problem an outsider should touch at all.

A wrong engagement isn’t just wasted money. It’s months spent producing an analysis that confirms what you already suspected, while the decision that mattered sits and waits. The real cost is the delay, not the invoice.

Four times why the answer is no

Here’s where I tell people to save their money.

You already know the answer. Sometimes a CEO knows exactly what to do and just wants cover to do it. That’s not strategy work. That’s a CFO conversation, a board vote, or an afternoon of nerves. Paying an outsider to bless a decision you’ve already made is expensive theater. A competent and ethical advisor should know when more internal work needs to be done before asking an outsider.

The problem is execution, not choice. You know where you’re going. You just aren’t getting there. That’s a discipline problem. You need an operator, a project lead, or an honest look at your own follow-through. An execution advisor will hand you a cleaner version of the plan you already have, and you’ll still be stuck. Another point is that some strategies are so poorly formulated that even disciplined execution is challenging.

Two people disagree, and everyone knows who. Plenty of “strategy” problems are really one unresolved argument between two executives. The whole company can see it and no framework will fix that. A direct conversation can sometimes be with an executive coach in the room. Dressing it up as a strategy project just delays the talk.

The bet is small and reversible. If you can test the idea cheaply and back out without much damage, don’t study it. Test it to learn from the real thing. Save the deep work for the decisions you can’t take back. This is what Jeff Bezos introduced in 1997 as one-way (Type 1) and two-way (Type 2) door decisions. You can’t reverse Type 1 decisions (e.g., building a factory), but you can reverse Type 2 decisions (e.g., trying early AWS services).

When it’s actually worth it

So when should you hire someone? Three signs, and they tend to show up together.

The bet is big and hard to reverse. Significant capital, a new market, a new executive team, a merger, or a change to the business model. The kind of move where being wrong costs you years, not weeks, of not the business.

The team disagrees on the choices, not just the details, and there’s no shared logic to settle it. Smart people, looking at the same facts, pulling in different directions.

The plan rests on assumptions nobody has tested. Everyone believes the market wants it, R&D can deliver, or key staff will remain. But none of these assumptions have been explicitly checked. These beliefs, and more, are propping up the whole strategy, and it has never been taken out for a test run.

Picture a company betting a third of its capital on a new product line. The CEO is sold. Two VPs aren’t, and they’ve gone quiet instead of arguing. The whole case rests on one belief: that current customers will buy the new product, and nobody has actually asked them. Or your suppliers, staff, investors, or other stakeholders. Big bet, split room, untested assumption. That’s the engagement worth paying for. Take away any one of the three, and you could probably sort it yourself.

When all three show up at once, an outside read earns its fee. Not because the CEO can’t think. Because the stakes are high enough that a second, structured look is cheap insurance. The rest of the time, you’re better off keeping your money and having the harder internal conversation you’ve been putting off.

Why I’ll tell you not to hire me

I run a short call before any engagement. People assume it’s a sales call. It isn’t, or at least it isn’t only that. Its real job is to sort which situation you’re in. Sometimes we get twenty minutes in and the answer is clear. You don’t need a project. You need a heart-to-heart with your CFO, settle a disagreement, or just decide. I’ll say so.

Some might see this as giving up revenue in the short run. But it’s the only version of this business worth running. The value of a yes depends entirely on the honesty of the no.

An advisor who can’t say “you don’t need me” can’t be trusted when he says “you do.”

The opposite mistake is real too. Some CEOs never bring in help when they should, and they pay for it later with a failed bet in public. Independence is a virtue right up until it turns into avoidance. So the test isn’t whether you’re tough enough to skip the consultant. It’s whether the thing in front of you is really one of the four where an outsider adds nothing.

Your move this week

Before your next instinct to bring in help, run the four-question test. Do I already know the answer? Is this really execution? Is this one argument two people keep avoiding? Is the bet small and reversible? If you answer yes to any of them, you probably don’t need a consultant. You need a conversation, and you already know who it’s with. If you want some perspective, I’m happy to walk through these questions with you.

If you answer no to all four, and the bet is big, the room is split, and the plan rests on something untested, then an outside look is worth it. Either way, the smartest thing you can do is ask the question the government took years to ask. Do we actually need this? Ask it first, and ask it out loud.

Next week: a plan is not a strategy, and your board may not be able to tell the difference. What separates the two, and why the gap tends to surface at the worst possible moment.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of C-level experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more ·Connect on LinkedIn ·New in the chair, or about to be? Get a clean read before you commit to a direction you inherited. Schedule a call.

Search firm Russell Reynolds made that point in its work on CEO transitions. The first 100 days get all the coverage (link). The real handover plays out across 12 to 18 months. Leaders who do it well pace themselves and work to understand the business before making bold moves. Those who struggle treat speed as if it were progress.

That runs against nearly every instinct a new CEO walks in with.

New CEOs understandably believe they have everyone looking at them for fast results: board, management team, investors, employees, and customers.

You arrive with a mandate. The board hired you to change (i.e., usually “fix”) something. Your team is watching for a signal. Everyone wants to know what’s different now that you’re in the hot seat. So the pressure builds to name a direction fast and prove you’re running the place. Make changes before people settle back into the comfort of tradition.

Here’s the problem. On day 30, you don’t know enough to commit to anything worth committing to. You’ve inherited a plan you didn’t write, built on assumptions you haven’t tested, defended by the people who were in the room when previous leadership made it. Announce a bold new direction on top of that, and you’ve bet your credibility on a read you haven’t earned.

Naming the new CEO trap

Most new CEOs do the opposite. They keep running the inherited strategy. They adjust the edges. They tell themselves they’ll fix the core once things settle down. Things don’t settle down. The honeymoon closes. And the strategy becomes theirs, whether they meant to own it or not.

That’s the trap. You spend the most valuable months you will ever have, the cheap ones, executing someone else’s assumptions. Not because you believe them. Because unwinding them feels harder than living with them (it is).

The strategy you inherit becomes yours the day you stop questioning it. Most new CEOs stop too early.

Neither right nor wrong

The mistake underneath the trap is treating the inherited strategy as a keep-it-or-kill-it question. It’s rarely that clean. Sure, some of what you inherited is probably sound and worth protecting. After all, you decided to take the helm of this company, thinking it had a future. Some of the strategy made sense two years ago, but the market has since evolved. Some was never tested at all, just stated with enough confidence that people quit asking. On day 30, you can’t tell which is which. Neither can the team that built it. They’re standing too close to see it.

That gap is the case for a clean read before a loud declaration.

A close read of the strategy is not a weakness.

Incoming CEOs hear “diagnose before you decide” as a stall. It isn’t. Sitting still is a stall. A structured read is the most active thing you can do in your first quarter, and it looks like leadership because it is. You’re separating what holds from what doesn’t, on purpose, while challenging the old plan is still relatively low-cost.

Question an inherited assumption in month two, and nobody’s ego is on the line yet. Now, question the same assumption in month ten, after you’ve publicly backed it, and you’re no longer “adjusting a strategy. You’re reversing yourself in front of the team that reorganized around your last call. That costs something you don’t get back at a discount.

What the read actually is

Say you’re four months in. Revenue’s holding, so nobody’s alarmed. But you notice the sales team is still chasing a segment the last CEO pushed, and you’ve started to doubt it’s the right one. Do you call it out now, or wait for the numbers to prove you right? Wait, and you’ve spent two more quarters funding a bet you don’t believe. That’s the price of a soft read.

Now, the strategy read has two parts, in order.

First, an honest map of where the company actually stands. Not the strategy in the deck. The strategy in practice, the one you can read off the budget, the hiring, and what people actually spend their days doing. You know very well that those two versions are rarely the same document. A short, focused diagnostic, which is what HSS runs as a PRIME engagement, is built to surface that gap in about a day.

Second, clarity on the choices. Once you can see the real terrain, you name the two or three decisions that actually matter and test the logic under each one. That’s the work of a SPRINT: a fast, structured pass to the real problem and the genuine options, without forcing a commitment you’ll have to walk back.

Neither one asks you to blow up the organization in week one. Both give you the read before you bet your honeymoon on it.

The part nobody schedules

Here’s what doesn’t make it into the onboarding plan. The most confident new CEOs are often the ones running the most inherited strategy. They mistake conviction for knowledge. They came in sure of what needed fixing, fixed it, and never checked whether the thing they fixed was what was broken or, worse yet, overcome by events. Certainty on day 30 isn’t a strength. It’s the confidence you haven’t earned yet.

Your move this week

If you’re a new CEO or you hired one in the last year, ask one question. Of the strategy you’re running right now, how much did you actually decide, and how much did you inherit and keep because changing it felt expensive?

If you can’t answer cleanly, that’s not a failure. It’s the starting point. The honeymoon is the cheapest time you’ll ever get to find out. Spend it on the strategy read, not the declaration.

Next week: when the honest answer is that you don’t need a strategy consultant. Sometimes the right move is an internal conversation, and saying so out loud is the most credible thing an advisor can do.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more ·Connect ·New in the chair, or about to be? Get a clean read before you commit to a direction you inherited. Schedule a call.

This was the day of my very first lesson (had to sit on phone books to see!)

When you start out, the instruments are all you have. You have no feel for the airplane yet, no instinct for what is normal, so you fly by the numbers because the numbers are the only thing you can trust. A student pilot stares at the panel. He has to. He hasn’t earned the right to look away. That has to change quickly to navigate safely.

WHAT EXPERIENCE ACTUALLY CHANGES

As you log hours, that does shift. You start to feel the airplane, to sense a wrong attitude before a gauge confirms it, a change in the engine before the tach shows it, and the sound of the air across the wing that hints that you should check the airspeed indicator. The feel becomes primary, and the instruments become the check, the confirmation, the second opinion. You fly the airplane by judgment, and you glance at the panel to make sure your judgment is telling you the truth. The balance shifts over the years from instruments-first to judgment-first. But it never becomes judgment-only, because a good pilot knows his senses can lie.

That is the part beginners never guess. The dangerous condition is rarely the instruments failing. It is weather, when the world outside the window turns white, and your own body starts telling you things that are not true. Your inner ear says you’re level even during a slow turn. It tells you to climb when you’re fine. In a cloud, feeling is not just useless, it’s a liar. And that is exactly when you have to trust the instruments over every instinct screaming at you to do the opposite. Learning when to trust takes years. Most of an instrument rating is an instructor covering your view and trying to fool you on purpose, until believing the panel over your gut becomes something you can actually do while afraid.

The experienced pilot isn’t choosing between feel and instruments. He’s running both and reading the panel well enough to see trouble coming before a beginner would feel it at all.

So the goal is not to graduate from the instruments. The goal is to develop real feel, back it with a disciplined scan of the panel, and get experienced enough to read what the instruments are telling you before the story is obvious, weather building, traffic converging, a system drifting out of range. Anticipation is the skill. It only comes from experience and from deliberately flying in different conditions instead of the same easy circuit over and over.

THE PLAN IS NOT THE FLYING

Now put a flight plan in that picture. A plan is a route worked out on the ground, under assumed conditions. Good work, worth doing. But here is where it goes wrong in both airplanes and companies. Too often, a strategic plan is built by a couple of people, handed to everyone else, and never really understood by the person who has to “fly” it. If you didn’t help build it and if nobody explained what it means or why, you’re holding paper you can read but can’t implement or adapt. And initial conditions never hold still. The business acronym VUCA stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. It’s a fancy way of saying the weather always changes and the plan always assumed it wouldn’t.

When conditions shift, the borrowed plan is worthless, because reading a plan is not the same as understanding it, and understanding it is not the same as being able to fly the airplane. What carries you through is the same thing it is in a cockpit: feel earned through experience, instruments checked often enough to catch what your senses miss, and a clear hold on where you are and where you meant to go. The plan gets you started. The flying is everything after. Strategy follows the same principles.

My father died in 2021, at 100 years old. We bonded over aviation, trading airplane pictures and terrible flying jokes right to the end. He gave me a great deal of insight about strategy from flying without meaning to. The best was the habit he drilled into a thirteen-year-old who thought he was just learning to fly. Know where you are. Trust what you’ve learned to read. Then decide.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more: haasstrategy.com/about-mark · Connect: linkedin.com/in/markrhaas · Ready to build a living strategy that keeps pace with your market? Schedule a call: calendly.com/mhaas-hss/hss-strategy-fit-conversation

Here is the part most people skipped. The banks didn’t pass because they got lucky. They passed because the law makes them run this test every single year, against shocks they don’t expect and don’t want to think about. The discipline is forced on them. Dodd-Frank was built after 2008, when a lot of very smart people discovered their assumptions were wrong at the worst possible moment.

Now ask yourself a simple question. When did your strategy last go through anything like that?

THE TEST NOBODY MAKES YOU TAKE

For most companies between $5 million and $100 million, the honest answer is never. There is no regulator standing over a mid-market CEO, requiring an annual test of whether the strategy survives a bad year. So it doesn’t happen. The strategy gets written, the binder gets printed, and everyone goes back to running the business on a set of assumptions nobody has examined in a while.

This is called strategy debt. It’s the accumulated weight of assumptions that have been sitting around long enough to feel like facts. Founder intuition. Last year’s playbook. The way we’ve always done it. None of it was tested against the world that exists right now. The team stopped questioning these things a long time ago, which is exactly what makes them dangerous. You don’t stress-test what you’ve stopped noticing.

You don’t stress-test what you’ve stopped noticing. That’s what makes strategy debt dangerous.

EVEN A GOOD TEST CAN TEST THE WRONG THING

The Fed test is useful here in a second way, one that the banking commentators caught. Even a mandatory, rigorous stress test can carry strategy debt of its own. This year’s scenario modeled a 2008-style recession in detail. It did not model a coordinated cyberattack that takes a major bank offline. It did not model an AI-driven shock or a crisis spilling out of the fast-growing private credit market. As one analyst put it, passing a test built around yesterday’s risks is not proof you’re ready for tomorrow’s. The bank passed the test. The test was checking for the wrong disaster.

That is the trap in miniature. It isn’t enough to test your strategy. You have to test it against the shocks that are actually coming, not the ones that already happened. Most companies that do any scenario planning at all run last decade’s emergency. They prepare for the recession they remember, rather than the disruption they haven’t yet imagined.

THREE QUESTIONS AND A FEW HONEST HOURS

So what would a real stress test look like for a company your size? It doesn’t require a regulator or a 200-page model. It requires a few honest hours, real numbers, and a leadership team OK with being uncomfortable.

Start with regulatory shock. What happens to your margins if a rule changes in 48 hours? How about tariffs in your core industry? Most teams have never done that math. The conversation usually starts with “that won’t happen to us” and ends with “we should probably check.”

Then technological displacement. What if a competitor automates the thing you charge for? AI is the obvious version right now, but the question is older than any chatbot. The teams that hold up are the ones that already had this argument with themselves, on purpose, before the market forced it.

What about economic disruption? What if the cost of a key input doubles, or capital costs spike, or demand drops 20% in a quarter? You don’t need to predict which one. You just need to know whether your business model logic survives any of them.

ASSUME IT ALREADY FAILED

Now run the other half. Assume it’s two years from now and the strategy has already failed. Not vaguely. Specifically. Work backward and name the faults that sank it. This isn’t pessimism. It’s how you find the early-warning signals worth watching, the ones that tell you an assumption is breaking while you still have room to move. Most strategies have no such signals. They run until the failure is impossible to miss, by which point the response window has closed.

The banks don’t test themselves because they’re pessimists. They test because the cost of a quiet, unexamined assumption is too high to leave to chance. Engineers do the same thing with bridges. Pilots do it in simulators. Football teams do it to prevent foreseeable disasters. For them, the discipline of finding the breaking point in a controlled setting, before you find it in the field, is baked into their operations. We’re just slow to apply it to strategy, where the failure is just as real and a lot quieter.

THE PART THAT’S ON YOU

The uncomfortable truth is that if your strategy hasn’t been through something like this, don’t rely on it. Not because the thinking is wrong. The thinking is probably fine. But fine thinking that has never met resistance is just confident opinion. The market doesn’t respect confidence. It respects logic that has held up under pressure.

The banks got their reassuring headline last week because somebody made them earn it. Nobody is going to make you earn yours. That part is on you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more about Mark · Connect · Ready to pressure-test your strategy before the market does? Schedule a call

A research group in Arlington (Info-Tech Research Group) published a finding this month that should be uncomfortable reading for any executive team: up to 80 percent of new products fail. Not because the products are bad. Because the strategies behind them are built on internal assumptions rather than market reality.

That’s not a startup problem. It’s a mid-market problem. It’s a large-company problem. And it’s one we all sort of know, but we let hope outweigh sense when we launch either products or strategy. It’s especially a problem when the people making the strategic choices are getting their information primarily from each other.

The fix isn’t more analysis. It’s different input. Specifically, input from the people outside the organization whose behavior the strategy depends on.

Most validation involves talking to people who already agree with you. That’s not validation. That’s confirmation.

WHAT YOU’RE ACTUALLY TESTING

In the April 21 article, we covered WWHTBT (What Would Have To Be True?): for each strategic option, what conditions must hold for it to succeed? In the following week, those conditions got sorted into “priority uncertainties,” the assumptions that are both high-stakes and low-confidence (worth a re-read).

Stakeholder validation is how you find out whether those conditions actually hold.

This is not general market research. It’s not a customer satisfaction survey or an annual NPS score. You have specific conditions on your list and specific questions that would confirm or challenge each one. The research is focused because the questions are focused.

If one of your priority uncertainties is ‘mid-market professional services firms in our region will pay a premium for faster turnaround,’ you need to talk to mid-market professional services firms in your region and ask them directly. Not ‘what do you value in a vendor?’ in the abstract. Ask the specific question that tests the specific condition.

WHO YOU NEED TO TALK TO

The instinct is to start with your best customers. They know you, they like you, and they’ll take your call. That’s a reasonable starting point, but an incomplete one. Ask a range of stakeholders:

Current customers, including the awkward ones. The client who uses you for some things but not others. The one who reduced their engagement last year. The one who gives you decent reviews but never refers anyone. These gaps give you great insight. Your best customers will tell you what you do well. Your complicated customers will tell you what you don’t.

Customers who left. This is the most uncomfortable conversation and often the most informative. People who stopped working with you have a specific reason. That reason is usually more precise than anything you’ll hear from people who stayed.

People who evaluated you and chose someone else. They went through a decision process. They know exactly what mattered and how you compared. That’s precision information that’s hard to get any other way. Harder to find, but your salespeople can tell you who they are.

Frontline employees. They hear things leadership doesn’t. The customer complaint that keeps coming up but never makes it into the quarterly review. Objections the sales team encountered but didn’t escalate. The product limitation that clients work around (and the reason they may be ready to source elsewhere). This intelligence is usually available and rarely accessed.

Partners and suppliers. They see how clients talk about you when you’re not in the room. A partner who distributes your service knows things about perception and positioning that your internal team doesn’t.

WHAT GOOD VALIDATION LOOKS LIKE

It’s a good day when you hear something you didn’t expect.

If every conversation confirms what you already believe, one of two things is happening. Either your assumptions were accurate (possible), or you’re only talking to people with reasons to tell you what you want to hear. Or you are asking questions structured to produce confirmation rather than challenge.

Good validation interviews are organized around open questions that let the other person tell you what actually matters to them. Your WWHTBT conditions are the listening framework, not the question list. You’re listening for whether the conditions show up in what they say, not prompting them directly. Your best insights come from asking uncomfortable questions.

Think about a consulting firm planning an expansion into healthcare IT. Their priority uncertainty is likely whether their existing methodology would resonate with a buyer profile that had different procurement timelines and different success metrics than their current clients. This is the kind of assumption that lies at the core of their business model but is usually overlooked.

Let’s say, of the twelve people they interview, eight conversations were broadly positive. The four that weren’t are the ones that matter. Imagine if each of those four raise the same issue: the firm’s engagement model required a level of ongoing executive access that healthcare IT procurement that the consulting teams couldn’t sustain. It wasn’t a deal-killer. But it meant the engagement model needed to be adapted before the expansion, not after the first failed engagement. That’s what validation is for.

The four uncomfortable conversations will tell you more than the eight comfortable ones.

THE CONFIRMATION TRAP

It takes a bit of thought to validate effectively. The most common failure isn’t asking the wrong questions. It’s talking to the wrong people.

Across the categories of customers shown above, picking the right individuals is also important. We naturally gravitate toward accessible, friendly, and successful relationships when designing our validation process. The customer who loves us. The partner who’s enthusiastic about the opportunity. The board member who believes in the strategy.

None of those people is going to tell you that your expansion assumption is wrong, even if they suspect it is. Not because they’re dishonest, but because the social dynamics of existing relationships work against that kind of direct challenge.

The people most likely to tell you something true and uncomfortable are the ones you don’t already have a relationship with. Former clients. Prospects who chose someone else. Potential partners who’ve watched your competitors operate in the target market. Those conversations are harder to arrange and more likely to change your mind. That’s why they’re worth the effort.

HOW THIS FITS BUILD

Stakeholder validation is the core work of months two and three in a BUILD engagement. The future-state cascade is drafted. The priority uncertainties are named. Now the team goes outside.

Depending on the size of your company, plan on fifteen to twenty-five conversations across the stakeholder groups above, conducted with a consistent interview guide (i.e., not winging it in an unstructured conversation), built around the specific conditions on the WWHTBT list. Synthesize the findings, noting which assumptions held, which were challenged, and which demand a response before your strategy is finalized.

The second version of the Business Model Canvas, produced in month four of BUILD, incorporates what was learned. The gap between Canvas v1 and Canvas v2 is the record of what changed and why. That record is also what makes the final strategy defensible in a board presentation. The leadership team isn’t saying ‘we believe this.’ They’re saying ‘here’s what we learned, here’s how it changed our thinking, and here’s why we’re confident in the direction we’ve chosen.’

That’s a critical conversation for the board.

YOUR MOVE THIS WEEK

Pick one assumption your current strategy rests on. Something treated as settled, but not formally tested.

Identify two or three people outside your organization who are in the best position to confirm or challenge it. Not people likely to agree. People who would know if you’re wrong.

Then go have the conversation. Ask open questions. Don’t lead toward the answer you’re hoping for.

What you hear is more useful than what you believe.

Next week: The Strategy Stress Test. How the entire BUILD process challenges your choices against the scenarios most likely to break them, before the market does it for you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more about Mark | Connect on LinkedIn

Ready to build a living strategy that keeps pace with your market? Schedule a call.

The World Economic Forum published a piece in March on how corporate strategy is changing. The headline argument was about volatility, AI, geopolitics, and why strategy has never been harder. It is worth at least a scan if not a full read (link to article).

But buried in the middle was a sentence worth keeping: “Some things have not changed. CEOs are still making fundamental choices: where to play and how to win.”

That’s an important distinction. It points to something that many organizations get wrong: they accept the vocabulary without doing the work those words require. They write down a where-to-play and a how-to-win. They think they are done. Then they wonder why the strategy doesn’t hold. It’s because it isn’t a full strategy.

The above image is the point. Of five points of view, two might be clear, but three others are a bit fuzzy and may be seriously misaligned. You don’t know until you explore fully and ensure all fice points of view are internally consistent.

Roger Martin’s concept of the strategy cascade, developed through his work at P&G and formalized in Playing to Win, provides one structured way to answer that question. It has five levels, from winning aspiration down to management systems. Each level answers a specific question. Each has to be consistent with the others.

It isn’t a template. It’s a logic test. And the five levels have to pass the test together, not separately. This is also not a binder of prose but a one or two-sheet summary of key decisions that are internally consistent.

A strategy is not the sum of five good answers. It’s five answers that are consistent with each other.

WHAT THE CASCADE IS

The five levels form a connected argument about how the organization intends to succeed.

This isn’t a planning tool. It’s a coherence test. When you write out and read the five answers as a connected argument, the inconsistencies become visible. Note: they’re almost always there.

THE COHERENCE TEST

Most strategy documents fail this test in one of two places.

The first is where-to-play and how-to-win. The aspiration sounds compelling. The markets are identified. But the competitive basis, the how-to-win, is generic and applies equally to every segment listed. “Superior customer service” and “innovative solutions” are not how-to-win statements. They’re marketing language. A real how-to-win is specific enough that it wouldn’t apply to a competitor in the same segment.

The second failure is between capabilities required and management systems. For example, your strategy says deep relationships are your competitive basis. The management systems measure transactions, track volume, and reward new account acquisition. Those systems are therefore perfectly designed to undermine the stated strategy. Nobody decided to do that. It was just a continuation of existing systems.

Running the cascade as a coherence test surfaces both problems. That’s not the same as solving them. But you can’t solve a problem that hasn’t been named yet.

What you measure is what you manage. If the metrics don’t match the strategy, the metrics win every time.

CURRENT STATE VERSUS FUTURE STATE

In a SPRINT engagement with HSS, the team produces a current-state cascade. Not the strategy as written, but the strategy as practiced. What does the resource allocation actually say about where we’re competing? What does customer behavior actually reveal about how we win, or fail to win? If you read that statement to them, would they say that it was unambiguously about you?

That version is usually uncomfortable. The current-state cascade makes visible the gap between what the organization says it’s doing and what it’s actually doing. A company that claims to compete on premium quality but prices its goods and services at market rate and operates with a commodity cost structure is not executing a premium strategy, whatever the mission statement says.

BUILD produces the future-state cascade. The direction chosen through the Possibility Set and validated through stakeholder research is translated into all five cascade levels. Where specifically will the organization compete? On what specific basis? For what must it genuinely be excellent? What management systems will make those capabilities real rather than aspirational?

The gap between the two cascades is the strategy work. It defines what has to change, at every level, to move from where you are to where you’ve decided to go. And, most importantly, what you are willing to give up.

WHY THE BOTTOM TWO LEVELS GET SKIPPED

Capabilities required and management systems are the least glamorous levels of the cascade. They’re also where strategy goes to die.

Leadership teams spend real energy on winning aspiration and where-to-play. Those conversations are engaging. They’re about possibility and ambition. They are also about factors that don’t consume budget and talent. Get those wrong and no heads roll (well, maybe the CEO’s).

Capabilities required is harder because it forces honesty about what the organization actually does well versus what it wishes it did well. Most organizations have a significant gap between stated capabilities and real capabilities. Writing it out makes that gap visible in a way that’s difficult to ignore. And the cost to get those capabilities.

Management systems is hardest of all because it’s the most operational and the most politically charged. Changing how the organization measures and rewards behavior is not a strategic decision in the abstract. It affects specific people’s jobs, incentives, and status. That’s why it tends to get deferred, discussed, and eventually not done.

A cascade that’s complete through how-to-win and vague on capabilities and systems is a cascade that describes aspiration, not strategy. Roger Martin made this point about P&G’s early strategy work: the first three levels were clear but the bottom two were weak. The strategy didn’t hold until all five were developed with equal rigor.

THE DMV CONTEXT

For organizations in the DC region, this matters in a specific way. The federal contracting market is competitive on price and relationships simultaneously, which creates an inherent tension in any where-to-play and how-to-win combination. A firm that tries to win on both axes in the same segment will find its capabilities requirements are contradictory and its management systems can’t serve both masters.

The cascade makes that tension explicit. Which is the real basis for winning here? The answer has operational consequences that run all the way down to how the firm hires, how it prices, and how it measures success.

YOUR MOVE THIS WEEK

Write out your draft As-Is cascade. Start with the winning aspiration, then work through where to play, how to win, capabilities required, and management systems. Don’t stop at the first pass.

The cascade is an iterative, recursive process. Once you’ve drafted all five levels, read them as a connected argument. Does the how-to-win follow logically from where you’ve chosen to compete? Do the capabilities required actually produce the competitive advantage you’ve claimed? Do the management systems support those capabilities or quietly undermine them? Will the whole system deliver on your winning aspiration? Is this strategy unique to your organization?

Where the answers conflict, revise and run through again. Keep cycling through the five questions until they’re internally consistent. Even if they answer all five questions, most organizations stop after one pass. That’s why most cascades describe aspiration rather than strategy.

Now for the real test. Give the cascade to a few trusted advisors, investors, customers, or partners and ask if this accurately reflects your organization. Then ask informally if it meets their needs as a key stakeholder. The disconnects are a strong input to your To-Be cascade.

The discipline isn’t finishing the cascade. It’s finishing a cascade where all five levels reinforce each other, and it makes sense to those affected by it.

Next week: Testing Assumptions with Real Stakeholders. Once you have a future-state cascade, the question is whether the underlying assumptions actually hold. That’s the work BUILD is designed to do.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more about Mark | Connect on LinkedIn

Ready to build a living strategy that keeps pace with your market? Schedule a call.

Not impulsively. We’d been watching what happened to people who kept saying they’d travel later, after the kids were grown, after the promotions came, after the medical situation resolved. Later has a way of not arriving. We were young, healthy, and unencumbered. We didn’t want to be like companies that have five-year plans that never materialize.

One year. Europe first, then Israel, Egypt, India, Nepal, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. We planned for as much as we could. Paris on Bastille Day, Jerusalem on Christmas, New Delhi on India’s Independence Day, and Singapore for Chinese New Year. We planned those moments deliberately. Almost everything else we made up as we went.

THE PLAN WE MADE AND MOSTLY IGNORED

We did real planning before we left. Torn-up guidebooks. Research on each country. A general sense of where we wanted to go and what we wanted to see. We had goals: experience as much as possible, stay long enough in each place to actually understand it, and don’t treat travel as a checklist.

What we didn’t do was lock in a route. We had a direction, not a schedule.

That distinction mattered more than I expected. We made fewer mistakes than we would have on a fixed itinerary, not more. When the weather changed, we changed. When someone we met told us about a village we’d never heard of, we went. When we arrived somewhere and it wasn’t what we’d imagined, we moved on. When it was extraordinary, we stayed longer.

This kind of flexibility wasn’t laziness. It was how we got the most out of the trip. The plan gave us a framework. The conditions gave us the actual route.

We planned extensively, but we didn’t expect the plan to survive contact with reality unchanged. That expectation was the strategy.

THE MOMENT IN NEW DELHI

India was our favorite country. Nothing prepares you for it: the scale, the color, the noise, the history compressed into every surface. We arrived expecting differences and found them in every direction.

One afternoon near a public fountain in New Delhi, I watched a woman bathing her infant. She had nothing but a small container for water and a cloth. She worked with complete focus, the way a mother works when the task is the whole world.

It stopped me. Not because of what was different, but because of what wasn’t. This was the same as it would be in any place or time. The circumstances may have been different but the love was not.

Every company I’ve worked with since has that quality. The surface looks different: industry, culture, competitive position, and leadership team. But underneath the fundamental needs are the same. They want to understand their situation honestly and see genuine options. They want to know whether the direction they’ve chosen will actually hold up.

The BUILD engagement looks different for every organization because every organization’s situation is different. The framework is the same. The output has to be theirs alone.

You can’t use another company’s BUILD deliverables any more than you can use another family’s map of their own life.

WHAT THE TRIP TAUGHT ME ABOUT PLANNING

We got things wrong. For some countries we planned too little and felt it. Some we over-planned and lost the spontaneity that made other places memorable. We adjusted both directions as we went.

By the time we reached Japan, nearly a year in, we were much better at this than when we’d left Washington. We’d learned to read conditions faster. We knew our own patterns: what depleted us, what energized us, when to push and when to stop. We trusted the framework we’d built at the beginning and held the specific plans loosely.

Strategy works the same way. The framework is the strategy cascade, the problem statement, the validated assumptions, and the CEO Summary. Those are the equivalent of knowing you want to be in Paris on Bastille Day.

Everything else is adaptive. Who do you talk to in the stakeholder interviews? What do you learn from the customer conversations that changes your assumptions? Which priority uncertainties turn out to be more or less load-bearing than you thought when you named them?

The discipline isn’t following the plan. It’s knowing which parts of the plan are worth holding and which parts are placeholders waiting for real information.

THE PEOPLE YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU’D MEET

We had no idea who we would meet along the way. That uncertainty was part of the point. The people we encountered, in small hotels, on trains, at temples we’d almost skipped, changed the trip in ways no itinerary could have produced.

A couple we met on a train in Italy pointed us toward a village that became one of the most vivid memories of the whole year. A traveler in Nepal described a route that turned out to be exactly right for where we were physically and mentally at that point in the journey. The couple we met in Thailand invited us to dinner at their home in Hong Kong (turned out he was the head for security for Hong Kong). We couldn’t have planned for any of these.

In BUILD, the equivalent is the stakeholder interview that surfaces something you didn’t know to look for. The customer who describes their experience with your service in terms that don’t match how you’ve been thinking about. The partner who mentions a competitor move you hadn’t tracked. The former client whose departure turns out to have a specific, findable reason. You don’t know unless you specifically ask.

WHAT WE BROUGHT BACK

We came home different in ways that were hard to articulate at the time and obvious in retrospect.

I had a much cleaner sense of what was universal and what was specific. Human needs are universal. The form they take can be endlessly specific. That distinction shows up in every BUILD engagement. The framework applies everywhere. The deliverables belong only to the organization that produced them.

I also came back with a different relationship to planning itself. Not less rigorous. More honest about what planning can and can’t do. A plan is not a prediction. It’s a framework for making decisions as conditions reveal themselves. The better the framework, the better the decisions. We’ve heard the expression, “Don’t confuse the map for the territory.” The more we confuse the framework for the destination, the more brittle the whole thing becomes.

One year, almost twenty countries. A notebook full of observations and memories that turned out to be useful for decades.

We didn’t know exactly where we were going. We knew why we were going. That turned out to be enough.

Next week: The Strategy Cascade. How BUILD adapts Roger Martin’s five-level framework to translate strategic choices into a coherent architecture for where to compete and how to win.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more about Mark | Connect on LinkedIn

Ready to build a living strategy that keeps pace with your market? Schedule a call.

THE DISTINCTION THAT MATTERS

SPRINT delivers clarity. BUILD delivers confidence. Those are different approaches, and the difference matters when the stakes are high.

Clarity means the leadership team has agreed on the actual problem, built genuine options, tested the logic with WWHTBT, named the priority uncertainties, and produced a one-page CEO Summary they’ll stand behind. That’s real value and more than most organizations produce from planning processes twice as long.

Confidence is the necessary next step to a competent strategy. It means the strategic choices have been tested against reality. Customers have been asked. Partners have been probed. The assumptions that SPRINT named as uncertain have been checked against what the world actually says. The strategy has survived a stress test designed to break it.

Clarity tells you what you think. Confidence tells you whether what you expect will hold up.

Note the image above is P.T. Barnum’s marching 21 elephants across the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City in 1884 in response to the public’s concern that it wasn’t safe. Clarity was that the best engineers designed the newly constructed bridge. Confidence only came when it was tested by showing it wouldn’t collapse.

SPRINT gives you a map. BUILD tests whether your strategy can actually carry you forward before you bet the company.

THE MOVE IS NOT AUTOMATIC

Not every organization that completes SPRINT should move to BUILD. Some should, and some shouldn’t. The decision depends on one thing: the size of the bet.

Small adjustments to a working strategy don’t need four months of validation. If your team is clear on a modest change in direction, a refined customer segment, a repositioned service, or a pricing adjustment, SPRINT is probably enough. The priority uncertainties are real but not sufficiently load-bearing to warrant the time and investment required for a full BUILD.

When you have large commitments, the strategy requirements change. Consider an acquisition, a new market entry, a platform investment, a major restructuring, or even a board commitment that locks in resources for two years. In these situations, the cost of being wrong is high enough that clarity alone isn’t sufficient. You need to know whether the assumptions you’re betting on are actually true. This is where a lot of companies don’t spend time or attention.

Whether BUILD is warranted isn’t ‘do we have priority uncertainties?’ because every strategy does. The question is: if our priority uncertainties prove wrong, what does that cost us?

If the answer is manageable, SPRINT is sufficient. If the answer is very expensive or very difficult to reverse, BUILD is worth it.

Clarity is the starting point. Confidence is what you need before an irreversible commitment.

SPRINT VS BUILD AT A GLANCE

The two engagements are designed for different situations and produce different kinds of output.

The table makes the difference concrete. Sprint is internal diagnostic work. Build is external validation. Sprint names the uncertainties. Build closes them.

THE TRIGGER: PRIORITY UNCERTAINTIES

In the April 28 post, I covered how to identify priority uncertainties (assumptions that are both high-stakes and low-confidence). Together, those two dimensions define the cases where BUILD is necessary.

High-stakes means the strategy fails big time, not just underperforms, if the assumption turns out to be false. Low-confidence means you’re essentially hoping rather than knowing it.

When SPRINT produces a CEO Summary with two or three priority uncertainties in that category, and the organization is about to act on the strategy those uncertainties underpin, the case for BUILD is straightforward. You’ve named what you don’t know. BUILD is the process of finding out.

When SPRINT produces priority uncertainties that are consequential but can be investigated through quick conversations or a small pilot, that investigation can proceed without a formal BUILD engagement. The leadership team does the work, checks the assumptions, and proceeds (with appropriate humility) about what’s still open.

The line between those two cases is a matter of judgment, but the frame is clear. It’s about the “what if we’re wrong?” and whether the fastest credible answer requires four months of structured external work or something less.

WHAT BUILD ACTUALLY INVOLVES

Four months is not arbitrary. Genuine validation of strategic assumptions can’t be compressed much further without sacrificing the quality of the evidence.

You need enough conversations with enough different people, including people whose incentives lead them to tell you things you don’t want to hear, to distinguish real signal from noise. A customer who says your value proposition is strong because they want to keep you happy is not the same as a customer who says it because they’ve compared you to alternatives and you came out ahead. Getting to the second kind of insight takes time and discipline.

BUILD works in roughly three phases. The first month maps the as-is strategy and completes the current-state cascade, often surfacing things SPRINT didn’t have time to examine in depth. The second and third months are external: customer interviews, partner conversations, competitive analysis, market intelligence. The fourth month synthesizes what was learned into the deliverables: the future-state cascade, the validated business model canvas, the 12-month operating plan, and the board-ready package.

Note that the deliverables, per se, aren’t the point. The confidence behind them is. A leadership team that has done BUILD can point to specific evidence for each strategic choice. That’s a different posture than ‘we believe (hope) this is right.’

A CASE THAT ILLUSTRATES THE DISTINCTION

A healthcare services company in Northern Virginia completed Sprint with a clear CEO Summary. The strategic choice: expand from their current mid-Atlantic market into the Northeast over the next 3 years.

Their priority uncertainties included two critical assumptions. First, that the regulatory environments in their target states would allow their operating model without material modification. Second, that their primary referral relationships, built over ten years in the DMV, would transfer to a new geography through their existing partner network.

Both assumptions were plausible but neither had been tested. The expansion would require a $4-5M capital commitment and years of focused management attention.

They moved to BUILD. The regulatory analysis in month one revealed that two of their four target states required operating modifications that would reduce margin by roughly 15-20 percent. The partner network conversations in month two revealed that their referral relationships were more personal than institutional ones and wouldn’t transfer automatically.

The expansion still happened. But not in the original four-state configuration, and not on the original timeline. The capital commitment was reconfigured, margin assumptions were adjusted, and partner strategy was rebuilt around different assumptions.

That reconfiguration cost them four months and the Build engagement fee. The alternative was to commit $4+M based on assumptions nobody had checked.

BUILD won’t tell you the answer, but it will tell you whether your strategy is actually feasible.

YOUR MOVE THIS WEEK

If you’ve completed SPRINT, or if your organization is sitting on a strategic direction without having done SPRINT, look at your priority uncertainties.

For each one, ask two questions. First, what does it cost if this assumption is wrong? Not in general, but in dollars, months, or reversibility. Second, what’s the fastest credible way to reduce this uncertainty? What has to change, and who is accountable?

If the first answer is large and the second answer is ‘it would take structured external research,’ you’re describing a BUILD situation.

If the first answer is manageable and the second answer is ‘a few conversations and a pilot,’ SPRINT is sufficient. Have the conversations, do the pilot, and expect a little humility.

The goal isn’t to do BUILD for its own sake. It’s to commit resources in proportion to how well you understand the situation. That calibration is the whole point.

Next week: A personal piece. The year I spent traveling the world gave me a different picture of how organizations think about time, risk, and what planning is actually for.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more about Mark | Connect on LinkedIn

Ready to build a living strategy that keeps pace with your market? Schedule a call.

When I ask a CEO where their organization sits on a strategy maturity scale, the most common answer is: ‘Aspirationally a four, but probably a three.’

They’re almost always a two.

This isn’t a criticism. Level Two is where most well-run mid-market organizations land, and it has real strengths. The problem is that Level Two organizations often try to solve Level Four problems and wonder why the solutions don’t stick. Wrong intervention for the actual condition.

Knowing your maturity level matters because the prescription varies by level. What a Level Two organization needs is not what a Level Four organization needs. Think about a Level 3 Leader (Good to Great) deciding to apply Level 5 practices. Applying the wrong tool to the wrong situation is expensive and demoralizing.

Most organizations overestimate their strategy maturity by about one level. That gap explains many failed initiatives. HSS PRIME, SPRINT, BUILD, or SYSTEM services are designed to help move a company and leadership team up the maturity ladder.

WHAT LEVEL TWO ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

Since most mid-market readers are here, it’s worth describing Level Two in enough detail to be useful.

The annual plan is real. Real work went into it. Goals set, budget allocated, initiatives named. By February, it’s mostly being executed. By April, the first significant deviations appear. By July, the plan and the reality bear a passing resemblance. By October, everyone is working on next year’s plan while quietly acknowledging year’s didn’t hold.

The leadership team has different versions of the strategy. Ask five executives what the company’s top three strategic priorities are. You’ll get five lists that overlap but don’t match. Each person has filled the ambiguity with their own interpretation, usually the one that serves their function’s interests. Nobody is lying, but also nobody is aligned.

New initiatives keep getting added. Old ones rarely get formally closed. The organization has a list of strategic priorities that has grown by two or three items every year for the past four years. The list has never gotten shorter.

If that pattern sounds familiar, you’re at Level Two. It’s a diagnosis, not a verdict.

WHY LEVEL DOESN’T MEAN GOOD OR BAD

A startup in its first year should be at Level One. Flexibility and speed matter more than governance. A company that reaches $20-30M in revenue with Level Two strategy discipline has accomplished something real. The discipline that got it there, scrappy, responsive, opportunistic, is exactly what was needed.

The question isn’t whether your current level is acceptable. It’s whether your current level matches what your situation requires going forward.

A company about to make a major acquisition needs at least Level Three maturity before the deal closes. An organization facing a significant competitive disruption, losing foundational customers, or feeling the need to match a competitor’s AI power needs something more than an annual plan that won’t be updated until January. The mismatch between strategy maturity and situational demand is where a lot of mid-market firms get into trouble they don’t see coming.

The right level of strategy maturity is the one that matches what the environment is actually asking of you. No more, no less.

FOUR DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

Before you self-assess, four questions are more reliable than the instinct to say ‘probably a three.’

1. When did your organization last formally update its strategy in response to something that changed in the market? Not a budget revision. Not a new hire. A strategic choice that changed where you compete or how you win. If the honest answer is ‘last year’s annual planning cycle’ or ‘I’m not sure,’ the update mechanism isn’t working.

2. If you asked your five most senior leaders to describe the strategy in one sentence, how similar would the answers be? Not necessarily identical, but genuinely compatible. If they’d diverge on the substance of the competitive choice, not just the wording, the strategy isn’t shared. It’s understood differently by different people, which means it’s being resourced and executed differently.

3. How many strategic priorities does your organization currently have? Count them. If the answer is more than five, they’re not priorities. They’re a list. Priorities require tradeoffs. A list doesn’t.

4. What did you give up or significantly reduce since the last strategy cycle? If you are not making hard tradeoffs in an environment with limited resources, talent, and time, then you are not working a complete strategy.

The pattern in those four answers tells you more about your actual maturity level than any assessment tool.

WHAT THE STRATEGY MATURITY SESSION IS

The HSS Strategy Maturity Session is a 90-minute conversation designed to answer one question: given where your organization actually is, what’s the most useful next step?

It’s not a sales conversation dressed up as a diagnostic. The honest answer might be that you’re not ready for SPRINT yet. Or that you’ve already done the clarity work and what you need is validation. Or that you have both, and what’s missing is the governance rhythm to prevent drift.

The session maps where the organization sits on the five-level model, which inputs are reaching the strategy conversation (from last week’s framework), and where the largest gaps between current maturity and situational demand are. The output is a clear recommendation: here’s what would actually move the needle, and here’s why.

Sometimes that recommendation is to start with PRIME, the one-day diagnostic, before anything else. Sometimes it’s to go straight to Sprint. Sometimes it’s that the organization has done enough diagnostic work and needs Build validation before committing to a major bet.

The maturity level determines the right entry point. That’s the whole point of knowing it.

YOUR MOVE THIS WEEK

Run the four diagnostic questions above with your leadership team. Not in a planning meeting. Informally. Ask each person separately and compare the answers.

Then ask one more: given the competitive environment you’re actually operating in right now, is your current strategy discipline fast enough to keep up?

If the answer is no, or if it produces a pause before anyone answers, you’ve identified the gap the maturity model is designed to address.

Next week: From SPRINT to BUILD. When clarity isn’t enough and validation becomes the necessary next step.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy governance advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more about Mark | Connect on LinkedIn

Everybody thinks they own strategy until it requires them to give something up.

The CFO believes the financial model shows strategy. The VP of Sales believes market data reflects strategy. The board believes its oversight role includes shaping strategy. The COO believes delivery capability is the strategy. Nobody is wrong about their contribution. All of them are wrong about who owns it.

Strategy ownership isn’t about who has the most information or the clearest view of one part of the business. It’s about who has the authority to make tradeoffs. That authority sits at the top.

You can delegate research. You can’t delegate the decision about what to sacrifice.

THE FIVE LEGITIMATE INPUTS

Effective strategy draws from five sources. This isn’t a soft, collaborative-process statement. It’s operationally true.

CEO judgment. The CEO holds the pattern across everything: what the organization can actually do, where the real risks are, what the team will and won’t execute on. That synthesis isn’t available to anyone else in the same form. A CEO who doesn’t contribute their own view to the strategy process is abdicating the most valuable thing they bring. If they don’t, what was the purpose of those sleepless nights?

Board oversight. Directors bring external perspective, cross-industry experience, and governance accountability that management can’t provide (sometimes not even see) for itself. The best boards ask the questions leadership teams aren’t asking. They’ve seen the cycle before, and from different perspectives. They know which “confident” assumptions have a history of being wrong.

Customer signals. Customers know things about their own needs and frustrations that no internal team knows. What they actually buy versus what they say they want, why they stay, and why they leave. The gap between what you believe your value proposition is and what they actually experience is where strategy often breaks down.

Employee insight. Who would have known? Frontline employees see patterns that executives don’t see. The quality problem that shows up in every third delivery. The competitor that keeps coming up in customer conversations. The workaround people use because the official process doesn’t work. This insight is usually available, but rarely reaches the strategy conversation.

Stakeholder reality. Partners, suppliers, funders, vendors, and regulators have market visibility that doesn’t show up in internal reports. A supplier who’s watching your competitors buy more aggressively. A funder whose priorities are shifting. A regulator whose posture or compliance rules are changing. These signals arrive at the edges of the organization and, if at all, are processed well below the strategy level.

The discipline is separating input from ownership. All five sources should contribute. One person has to decide. And you now know who that is.

WHAT IF OWNERSHIP GETS DISTRIBUTED

When strategy ownership gets spread across functions or shared between the CEO and the board, the result is almost always a compromise strategy. It’s human nature. And it can get worse: look up the “Abilene Paradox” for some context.

Compromise strategies are recognizable. Every major initiative survives the planning process because no one has the authority to cut something that belongs to someone else. The plan does twelve things instead of four. Resource allocation is driven by internal politics rather than clearly stated strategic priorities. The result is a document that everyone agreed to and nobody is fully accountable for.

The giveaway isn’t what’s in the plan. It’s what’s missing. Genuine tradeoffs and hard choices. The specific decisions about what the organization will not do, will not pursue, and will not invest in. If those decisions aren’t visible in the plan, the hard choices were avoided. Usually because no one had both the authority and the will to make them.

I reviewed a strategic plan for a DMV company that ran to over 40 pages. It had eight strategic priorities, all of them legitimate. None of them had been ranked. None had been traded against each other. The document described everything the organization wanted to do and nothing it had decided not to do. The board approved it unanimously (over my objections).

Eighteen months later, the organization was exhausted and behind on all eight.

A strategy that offends no one has probably committed to nothing.

THE BOARD’S SPECIFIC ROLE

Boards are more confused by this than any other constituency. Most boards believe they share ownership of strategy with management. Most CEOs believe the board approves strategy rather than owns it. Both positions are defensible, but they can lead to friction.

The cleaner framing: the board owns strategy governance, not the strategy itself. That means setting the parameters within which management operates, asking hard questions about the strategic logic, holding management accountable for results, and replacing the CEO if the strategy is consistently failing.

What it doesn’t mean: writing the strategy, making operating tradeoffs, or substituting the board’s industry and operational experience for management’s knowledge of the specific business.

Part of this stems from the board's population often being current or former executives. Sometimes it is hard to take off your executive hat and put on a governance one.

A board that tries to own strategy ends up managing. A CEO who treats the board as a rubber stamp ends up unaccountable. Neither version serves the organization.

WHAT STRATEGY SYNTHESIS REQUIRES

CEO ownership requires a specific kind of intellectual work that doesn’t have a natural home anywhere else in the organization.

It requires taking the five inputs (the financial picture, the market intelligence, the operational realities, the board’s perspective, the customer signals) and identifying a coherent pattern across them. Not averaging them and certainly not finding a position that offends the fewest people. It means finding the direction that makes the most sense given what all five sources are saying (often with conflict or ambiguity) and then making a specific choice about where to compete and how to win.

That synthesis requires access to all the inputs, the authority to override any of them, and the willingness to be accountable for the result. Only the CEO has all three.

This is also why CEO engagement in the strategy process isn’t optional. A consultant or a strategy team can assemble the inputs and structure the analysis. They can run the workshops and facilitate the Possibility Set conversations. But if the CEO isn’t in the room when the real choices get made, choices don’t get made. They get deferred until someone with actual authority shows up.

THE PRIME ENGAGEMENT

Calibrating the five inputs is harder than it sounds. Each source has a different form, a different cadence, and a different degree of reliability. CEO judgment can be distorted by proximity to issues, time pressure, and past experience. Board perspective can be shaped by industry patterns that don’t apply to this specific situation. Customer signals can be misread or selectively heard. Employee insights don’t reliably travel up the org chart. Stakeholder reality arrives unevenly and often too late.

The HSS PRIME engagement is a one-day diagnostic designed to address this. A private CEO session in the morning maps the CEO’s current read of all five inputs: where they’re confident, where they’re uncertain, and where the inputs may conflict. A leadership half-day in the afternoon tests whether the leadership team’s picture matches the CEO’s. The strategy assessment summary identifies the gaps. This is where awareness and alignment start.

The output isn’t a strategy. It’s a calibrated picture of where the strategy currently stands, which inputs are well-understood, and where the diagnosis needs more work before a direction is chosen. PRIME is often the right starting point before a SPRINT, particularly for organizations whose leadership team has different versions of the same reality.

It’s the question before the question: before we choose a direction, do we all see the same field?

YOUR MOVE THIS WEEK

A diagnostic worth running before your next strategy conversation:

Take the five inputs. For each one, ask: what is this source actually telling us right now, and how recently have we checked?

Then ask: do the five pictures cohere, or are they pointing in different directions?

If the CEO’s view of the competitive position differs significantly from what customers are saying, or if frontline employee intelligence isn’t making it into the strategy conversation at all, you’ve found the diagnostic work that needs to happen before any strategic choice will stick.

The synthesis is the CEO’s job. But you can only synthesize what you’re actually receiving.

Next week: The Strategy Maturity Conversation. A five-level framework for understanding where your organization currently is and what kind of work would actually move it forward.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more about Mark | Connect on LinkedIn

Ready to build a living strategy that keeps pace with your market? Schedule a call.

The parents on the sideline were my “board of directors.” Some of them understood the mission. Others had come to see wins and were prepared to explain to me, at length, exactly how to produce more of them. With their kid in the starring role.

I learned more about leadership from those seasons than from much management literature I’ve read.

WHAT A COACH IS ACTUALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR

Every youth coach has the same conversation with the parents at the start of the season. I had mine 26 seasons times almost every week.

My job, I told them, was not primarily to win games. It was to develop players: their capabilities, their confidence, and their sense of how to function as part of a team. Winning was a byproduct of doing those things well over time. It wasn’t the product itself.

Most parents nodded. Some meant it. The ones who didn’t would find me after a loss to explain which substitutions I’d gotten wrong and how they had some “plays” that would definitely work.

The dynamic is identical in business. Shareholders and boards want results. That’s legitimate. But a CEO who manages only for this quarter’s results, at the expense of building the team and the capability that produces next year’s results, is optimizing the wrong variable. The problem is that the wrong variable is the one everyone can see.

The scoreboard shows the result. It doesn’t show the development that makes the next result possible.

THE CHAMPIONSHIP GAME

Final game of the softball season. We were playing the other undefeated team for the league championship. Our pitcher was one of the best I’d coached, and we went into the last inning two runs ahead.

She started walking batters.

Four runs ahead became three. Then two. The other team had bases loaded and the crowd was doing what crowds do. She called a timeout, and I walked out to the mound.

She was near tears. She asked me if I wanted to pull her.

I thought about it for about two seconds. We had another pitcher. The percentage move, if you were managing for the scoreboard, was probably to make the change. She was struggling. The lead was shrinking. The math wasn’t complicated.

But I’d watched her pitch all season and I knew she was capable. And I knew that if I pulled her in that moment, in front of the whole league, with tears on her face, she’d carry that for a long time.

I asked her whether she thought she could get back to pitching the way I knew she could. She said she’d try. I told her that her team and I only asked her to do her best, whatever that turned out to be.

She wiped her face. Gritted her teeth.

Walked in one more run. Then got the next two batters out. We won.

I didn’t know she’d get those last two batters. That’s what made it a decision rather than a calculation.

THE ESSAY

Years later, I heard from her mother. In a high school English class, she’d been asked to write about an adult she admired. She wrote about that moment on the mound.

She wrote about what it felt like when someone believed in her at the exact moment she’d stopped believing in herself.

I think about that essay when people ask me what leadership is actually for. You can describe it in strategic terms: developing capability, building resilience, creating the conditions for long-term performance. All of that is true and useful.

But what it actually looks like, in the moment, is deciding to trust your team when the safer move is to replace them or do it yourself.

THE TRADEOFF MISSING ON THE SCOREBOARD

Over 26 seasons, I made a lot of decisions like that one. Not all of them ended as well.

I played kids who weren’t ready, because they needed the experience. I left struggling players in games longer than the scoreboard logic suggested (or parents vigorously “suggested”), because pulling them would have cost more than the points it might have saved. I gave the ball to the kid with the least natural talent on the team because it was their turn and they’d earned it.

Some of those decisions cost us games. I never apologized for any of them.

The parents who wanted wins saw those choices as mistakes. The players who were on the receiving end of them learned what it means to be part of a team where adults treat you as more than a piece on a board.

Business leaders face the same tradeoff constantly. You can optimize for this quarter or you can invest in the person who isn’t ready yet. You can pull the struggling executive or you can stay in the conversation a little longer. You can staff the initiative with your best people or you can use it to develop the ones who need the stretch.

This is where readers will screech to a halt and feel that business is all about financial performance. This carries heavy weight, but long-term performance does rely on building asset value, culture, and loyalty.

There isn’t a formula. It’s judgment under uncertainty, with incomplete information, in front of an audience that’s mostly watching the scoreboard.

The leader’s job isn’t to win every game. It’s to build something that keeps getting better at winning.

WHY THIS CONNECTS TO STRATEGY

The SPRINT sequence we’ve spent the past six weeks on is a framework for making better decisions under uncertainty. Problem statements, Possibility Sets, WWHTBT, priority uncertainties, and CEO Summary. All of it is designed to make the reasoning behind strategic choices more explicit and more testable.

What it can’t do is make the choices easy. The moment on the mound wasn’t an analytical problem. I had information, I had judgment, and I had a kid looking at me with her “career” on the line, in her mind at least.

The frameworks are how you prepare for those moments. They help you go into the hard calls with a clearer picture of what you know, what you don’t know, and what you’re actually trying to achieve beyond the immediate result.

But the call itself is still yours. That’s what makes it leadership rather than management.

Next week: Who Owns Strategy? Why inputs are widely distributed but the decision belongs to one person.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.

Learn more about Mark | Connect on LinkedIn

Ready to build a living strategy that keeps pace with your market? Schedule a call.

I’ve watched this play out for 30 years in companies with $5 million to $100 million in revenue. The pattern isn’t a thinking problem. It’s a testing problem. Strategies don’t fail because the logic is wrong. They fail because the logic was never tested before commitment.

This is what the Strategy Arcade is for. It’s the part of a BUILD engagement, and a recurring part of SYSTEM, where we stop projecting and start probing. We put your strategy in a structured sandbox and try to break it before the market does.

The Arcade has two halves: a red-team session where we run the strategy against the disruptions most likely to materialize (regulatory shifts, technological displacement, economic shocks), and a Pre-Mortem, where we assume the strategy has already failed two years from now and work backward to identify the logic leaks today.

What you walk away with isn’t a 50-page document. It’s a tested logic of choice and a leadership team that has practiced the discipline.

I wrote up the full method this week. Why it matters more in 2026 than it did in 2019, what an Arcade actually looks like, and the honest answer for whether your strategy is ready for one.

Originally published at haasstrategy.com.

Read the full article on the Strategy Arcade

Reading time: 5 minutes

THE SHORT VERSION

Over the past six weeks, we’ve worked through the full Sprint sequence.

You’ve named the actual problem instead of the symptom. You’ve built genuine options instead of defaulting to Option A. You’ve run WWHTBT to test the logic. You’ve identified the assumptions with high stakes and low confidence.

Now what?

You put it on one page.

Not because brevity is a virtue in itself. Because if the strategy can’t fit on one page, the choices haven’t been made yet. Fuzzy thinking expands to fill whatever space you give it. One page means you made the hard calls.

A 40-slide strategy deck isn’t evidence of rigor. It’s evidence that nobody decided what mattered most.

WHAT GOES ON THE PAGE

The CEO Summary has five elements. Not sections, not chapters. Five things, all on one page.

1. THE PROBLEM STATEMENT

One sentence. The specific strategic challenge this plan is designed to address. If it takes more than one sentence, the diagnosis isn’t finished. It’s OK to redraft this a few times. Maybe write a paragraph and chop away.

2. THE STRATEGIC CHOICE

Where you’re competing and how you plan to win. Which option from the Possibility Set did you choose, and what does that choice foreclose? This is the hardest element to write because it requires saying no to something visible. Who likes to say no?

3. THE KEY INITIATIVES

Three or four concrete actions required to execute the choice. Not the full roadmap. The things that have to happen for the strategy to be real. Each needs an owner and a date. These are things where absence or underperformance is existential.

4. PRIORITY UNCERTAINTIES STILL OPEN

What you don’t yet know but must figure out before committing the next level of resources. This is the honest part of the page. Most strategy documents omit it entirely. Turn assumptions that everyone thinks are facts back into assumptions with uncertainties.

5. OWNER AND REVIEW DATE

Who’s accountable and when you’ll assess whether the strategy is working. Without this, the page is interesting reading. It’s not a working document.

THE TEST EACH ELEMENT PERFORMS

Every element on the page forces a discipline that the full strategy process was building toward.

The problem statement forces you to commit to a diagnosis. You can’t fit a vague description in one sentence. Either you know what the actual problem is, or you don’t. The page makes that visible immediately. It gets better with experience.

The strategic choice forces specificity about where you compete and why you expect to win there. ‘We’ll pursue growth across all segments’ doesn’t fit. That’s not a strategy either. The format demands a real answer.

Key initiatives force prioritization. You’ll have more ideas than will fit. Good. The exercise of deciding which three or four make the list is the strategy work, not a summary of it.

Priority uncertainties force honesty. Listing what you don’t know is uncomfortable. Most leadership teams skip it. Teams that include it make better decisions because everyone is working from the same picture of the risks.

Owner and review date force accountability. A strategy without a specific person responsible and a specific date for assessment is a preference, not a commitment.

THE ‘NO’ TEST

One diagnostic worth applying before you call the page done: can someone who reads it tell you specifically what your organization has decided not to do? Not Sophie’s Choice; just something(s) that is not a top priority

Real strategic choices have costs. Specific customers you won’t pursue. Market segments you’re leaving to competitors. Capabilities you’re choosing not to build because they don’t fit the direction.

If the page doesn’t describe any costs, the choices haven’t been made. You have a document about strategy rather than a document that is strategy.

A COO I worked with in Virginia had a beautifully written one-pager. Smart language, clean structure. When I asked her what market segments the company had explicitly decided not to pursue, she paused. ‘I don’t think we put that in there,’ she said.

That’s the tell. The page described aspirations. The choices were still pending.

WHO READS IT AND WHY

The CEO Summary has three audiences, and it needs to work for all three.

The leadership team. The page is the alignment artifact. Everyone should be able to read it and agree it accurately describes what they decided. If two people read it and come away with different understandings of the strategic choice, the choice wasn’t actually made.

The board. Directors don’t need the full analysis. They need to understand the strategic logic, the key risks, and what questions to ask management. A one-page summary gives them exactly that in the time it takes to read a page. A 60-slide deck gives them data and no clear point of view. More likely, they won’t bother reading it.

New executives. When someone joins the leadership team six months after the Sprint, they should be able to read the CEO Summary and understand where the organization is (and was) pointed and why. If they can’t, something about the organization’s strategy communication is broken.

WHAT THIS CLOSES

This is the sixth and final article in the Sprint sequence.

Weeks 9 (March 24) through 15 (this week) walked through every Sprint deliverable: the problem statement, the Possibility Set, the as-is strategy cascade, the WWHTBT logic test, the priority uncertainties, and now the CEO Summary. Together, they form a complete picture of what it takes to go from strategic fog to documented clarity in 6 weeks.

Some organizations stop here. They have what they need: a shared, honest picture of the situation, genuine options evaluated rather than assumed, and a one-page synthesis that the leadership team will stand behind. That’s real value. More than most organizations produce from a much longer planning process.

Others use the CEO Summary as the starting point for a Build engagement, in which priority uncertainties are investigated, and the strategy is validated against actual market feedback before making big bets. The page tells you what you’ve decided. Build tells you whether the decisions were right.

Sprint gives you clarity. Build gives you confidence. The CEO Summary is the document that connects them.

BUILD YOUR OWN THIS WEEK (I DARE YOU!)

Use the five-element structure above and give yourself 90 minutes.

Start with the problem statement. Write it in one sentence. If you find yourself reaching for a second sentence, that’s the signal the diagnosis still has work to do.

Move to the strategic choice. Write specifically where you compete and how you expect to win. Then write one sentence about what that choice forecloses.

Name three or four initiatives. Real ones, with owners attached.

List your priority uncertainties. The conditions from your WWHTBT analysis that are both high-stakes and not yet confirmed. Two or three is plenty. If you have more than that, you haven’t sorted them yet.

Add the review date. Pick a specific date, not a quarter. Specific dates produce accountability. Quarters produce drift.

When you’re done, give it the ‘no’ test. Then give it to someone outside the leadership team and ask them: What has this organization decided not to do?

Their answer will tell you whether the page is done.

Next week: A personal piece on strategic patience and what coaching youth sports taught me about the pace at which real development happens.

If you’ve been following this sequence and want to run a Sprint with a structured facilitator, the HSS Sprint engagement is built around exactly these five deliverables. Start with a Fit Call.

Run ‘What Would Have to Be True’ on three strategic options and you might end up with 15 conditions on your list. Could be more.

The temptation is to treat them equally, assign someone to research each one, and reconvene in a month. That approach burns time and misses the point.

The conditions on a WWHTBT list aren’t equivalent. Some are well-established facts that don’t need investigation. Some are uncertain but won’t hurt the strategy much even if they’re wrong. And a few are both uncertain and load-bearing. Those are your priority uncertainties. They’re where the work needs to go before you commit.

A priority uncertainty is an assumption with high stakes and low confidence. Everything else can wait.

HOW TO SORT THE LIST

Two questions tell you which conditions belong at the top.

First: how confident are you that this condition is currently true? Not confident in principle. Specifically. What evidence do you have? When did you last check? ‘We’ve always assumed this’ isn’t confidence. It’s a habit (one we need to break).

Second: what breaks if this condition turns out to be false? Does the option underperform, or does it fail completely?

Run those two questions against your list and it sorts itself. High-stakes and uncertain ones go to the top. Certain conditions or low-consequence conditions can wait or be set aside.

A manufacturing firm near Frederick ran this exercise on a planned market expansion. They had eleven conditions on their WWHTBT list. Nine were either well-established or relatively low-consequence. Two were neither. Both involved the same thing: whether their primary distribution partner would actively support the new territory, or treat it as a low-priority extension of their existing relationship.

Nobody had asked the partner directly. The expansion plan assumed active support. The entire unit economics depended on it.

That’s a priority uncertainty. Two questions, fifteen minutes of honest discussion, and the whole research agenda reorganized itself.

WHAT TEAMS DO INSTEAD

The most common alternative is researching what’s comfortable. Teams gravitate toward conditions they can answer quickly, or conditions that will confirm what they already believe. The spreadsheet fills up. The work feels thorough. The high-stakes uncertain assumptions stay untouched because addressing them requires going somewhere uncomfortable, usually outside the organization, to hear something that might not be welcome.

There’s also a version where teams name their priority uncertainties correctly and then don’t act on them. That’s bad. They get listed in the strategy document as ‘areas requiring further study,’ and the plan proceeds anyway. Also bad. That’s not risk management. It’s documentation of a known problem while ignoring it.

Naming a priority uncertainty without investigating it is just a more organized way of not knowing what you’re doing.

THE INVESTIGATION QUESTION

Once you’ve identified your priority uncertainties, the next question is: what’s the fastest credible way to reduce the uncertainty before committing resources?

Sometimes that’s a conversation. Talk to the distribution partner. Ask directly. The answer might be uncomfortable, but it takes a week, not a quarter.

Sometimes it’s a small test. A pilot program in one geography before committing to three. A single client engagement in a new segment before restructuring the whole delivery team.

Sometimes it’s external research. Relevant market data exist, you just haven’t looked for it. Trade associations, regulatory filings, competitor reports, and customer surveys from industry groups.

The point is to match the investigation to the uncertainty, not to run a comprehensive research project that takes six months and produces more uncertainty than it resolves. Priority uncertainties deserve fast, specific answers.

HOW THIS CONNECTS TO BUILD

In a Strategy Sprint, identifying priority uncertainties is one of the five deliverables. The analysis tells you what you know well enough to act on and what you don’t. The CEO Summary captures both.

When an organization moves from Sprint to Build, the priority uncertainties become the research agenda. Build is largely the work of going out and testing those conditions against reality. Customer interviews, partner conversations, pilot programs, competitive analysis. The priority uncertainties from Sprint tell you exactly where to look.

If all you do is Sprint, you leave with clarity. You understand the problem, you have genuine options, and you know what you’d need to believe for each option to succeed. That’s valuable. But the most consequential assumptions are still open. Build is what closes them.

YOUR MOVE THIS WEEK

Take your WWHTBT list from last week’s exercise, or build one now for your current strategy.

Sort it. Which conditions, if false, would cause the strategy to fail rather than underperform? Which of those do you have strong evidence for, and which are you essentially assuming?

The ones at the intersection of ‘would cause failure’ and ‘we’re assuming rather than knowing’ are your priority uncertainties. Write them down explicitly.

Then ask: what’s the fastest credible way to get a real answer on each one?

That’s your research agenda. Everything else is secondary.

Next week: The One-Page CEO Summary. Sprint’s final deliverable and the test of whether the strategy is actually clear enough to act on.

If your team has named its priority uncertainties but isn’t sure how to investigate them, that’s exactly where the Sprint-to-Build conversation starts. Learn more about the Build engagement at HSS.

Every strategic option rests on conditions that have to hold for it to work. Most leadership teams never write those conditions down.

They pick a direction. Build a plan. Get moving. The assumptions underneath stay invisible, untested, and occasionally wrong in ways that matter quite a lot.

There’s one question that fixes this.

“What would have to be true” for this option to succeed?

Six key words. The real trick is to actually answer the question.

WHY STRATEGY DEBATES GO NOWHERE

Sit in enough planning meetings and you’ll see the same pattern. Someone pushes for Option A. Someone else proposes Option B. They go around the table. Positions get restated in slightly different language. The meeting ends with a decision, a stalemate, or enough ambiguity that everyone can claim they got what they wanted.

Nobody examined the assumptions underneath either position. The debate was about conclusions, and conclusions are hard to test.

Roger Martin, who did strategy work at P&G for years and wrote one of the most useful books on strategy I know of, identified why this happens. The real disagreement isn’t about the option. It’s about what each person believes to be true about the world. Those beliefs stay hidden inside the argument. Surface them and you can actually examine them.

WWHTBT is how you surface them.

When you ask what would have to be true for your preferred option to succeed, you stop defending a conclusion, surface biases, and start naming conditions. Market conditions. Customer behavior. Operational performance. Competitor response. Things that have to hold for the option to work. Some are well-established. Some are guesses nobody has checked in two years. Many are grounded in irrefutable data. The ones that are shaky and load-bearing at the same time are where your attention should go.

HOW IT WORKS IN PRACTICE

Consider a leadership team that has developed a Possibility Set with three options: Option A extends the current direction, Option B pivots toward a new customer segment, and Option C proposes a joint venture with a complementary firm.

The WWHTBT question is applied to each option.

For Option A, what would have to be true? The current customer segment must remain loyal despite increased competition. Existing pricing power must persist. Delivery capacity must scale without a proportional rise in overhead. Each is a testable assumption.

For Option B, the new customer segment has to be large enough to justify transition costs. The team has to be able to reach them through channels not currently owned. Core capabilities need to translate to buyers with different needs. Again, these are testable.

For Option C, the partner has to provide capabilities that can’t be developed internally within the required timeframe. The economics have to benefit both parties. Integration has to be manageable while both organizations continue their core operations. Each of these conditions can be evaluated.

This approach gives the conversation momentum. Rather than debating preferences, the team examines whether the necessary conditions for each option are present.

The focus shifts from voting on options to auditing the underlying assumptions.

A vague debate about whether to pursue the federal market just became a set of specific questions. That’s the mechanism.

TWO QUESTIONS THAT DO THE MOST WORK

Once you’ve listed what would have to be true for an option, you run two questions against each condition.

First: how confident are you that this is actually true right now? Not confident in general. Specifically. What’s the evidence? When did you last check?

Second: what breaks if it turns out to be false? Does the option underperform, or does it fail entirely?

A condition that’s both uncertain and load-bearing is a priority uncertainty. That’s where the investigation needs to go before you commit resources. We’ll get into that specifically next week.

The conditions that are certain and low-stakes? Stop spending time there. The analysis is designed to concentrate attention on what actually matters. Most planning processes don’t do that.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE APPLICATION

Something uncomfortable tends to happen when you run WWHTBT on Option A, the default direction, the current plan extended.

Teams often realize they have never formally tested their default strategy.

Option A feels safe because it is familiar. But familiar is not the same as validated. The conditions that made Option A work two or three years ago may no longer hold. The customer loyalty assumption has not been examined. The pricing power assumption has been taken for granted. The competitive landscape assumption is based on last year’s data.

Applying WWHTBT to your current strategy is often more revealing than using it on alternatives. It quickly shows whether decisions are based on evidence or habit.

A CEO in Bethesda described realizing his company’s entire growth plan depended on a single assumption: that their largest client would continue to grow the relationship. This assumption had not been tested or discussed with the client in over a year.

Familiar isn’t the same as validated. Option A gets the least scrutiny and often deserves the most.

The assumption turned out to be wrong. They found out through the WWHTBT process rather than through a surprise non-renewal. That is not a small thing.

THREE WAYS TEAMS MISUSE THIS

The WWHTBT question is straightforward but often misapplied. We mess this up in three common failure modes.

Listing conditions that are already known to be true. If a condition is an established fact, it does not belong on your WWHTBT list. You are looking for the things that must hold but have not been confirmed. Padding the list with certainties is comfortable and useless.

Second, framing conditions as goals instead of facts. For example, ‘Our sales team would have to perform at a higher level’ is a hope, not a condition. A valid condition is specific and externally verifiable, such as ‘Our conversion rate on qualified leads would have to reach X percent, compared to our current Y percent.’ Only the latter can be tested.

Third, stopping after generating the list. Creating WWHTBT conditions is only the start of the analysis. Teams must examine these conditions before selecting an option. The list has value only if it is investigated.

HOW THIS FITS THE SPRINT

In a Strategy SPRINT, WWHTBT serves as the analytical engine connecting the Possibility Set to the final deliverables.

Options are developed in weeks two and three of SPRINT, followed by WWHTBT analysis for each. Conditions identified as both uncertain and high-stakes become priority uncertainties. These inform the CEO Summary and guide subsequent validation work in a Build engagement.

This analysis also forms the intellectual foundation of BUILD, which will be discussed later. Build involves engaging with customers, partners, competitors, and stakeholders to test whether the identified conditions hold.

However, the process begins here, with a single question.

You can’t validate assumptions you haven’t named. WWHTBT is how you name them.

YOUR MOVE THIS WEEK

Take one strategic option you’re currently considering. Or just take the direction you’re already executing.

Write down four or five conditions that would have to be true for it to succeed. Not goals. Conditions. External facts the plan depends on.

Then ask: when did we last actually check whether this is still true?

If the honest answer is “a while ago” or “I assumed it,” you’ve found your starting point.

Next week: Priority Uncertainties. Once you’ve named the conditions, the question is which ones to investigate before committing capital and talent. Not all uncertain conditions are equally consequential.

WWHTBT is a core part of every Strategy SPRINT at HSS. If your team’s working through options and needs a structured way to test the logic, the SPRINT is built for exactly that.

Get the “adventurous” (i.e., dangerous) stuff out of your system first.

One Saturday morning, I drove out to a small airfield before dawn with three friends. I was going to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

FOUR HOURS ON THE GROUND

The training took most of the morning. We packed parachutes. We practiced body position. We jumped off a platform and rolled on the ground, over and over, until it felt automatic. We covered emergency procedures for scenarios none of us expected to actually face.

By the time we walked toward the plane, I had consumed more information about skydiving than I had about most things I do regularly. (That’s me on the left)

I was not particularly nervous. I have a commercial pilot’s license, and I recognized the aircraft. That helped. My three friends were quieter than usual.

Before we boarded, the instructor gathered us on the tarmac. The engine was running. He had to shout to be heard.

“You are so anxious that you have forgotten everything from this morning. Just remember three things: push back from the plane, arch your back, and smile.”

I remember thinking: why did I get up before dark and spend four hours learning all this if three things were the whole answer?

THE JUMP THAT WENT SIDEWAYS

Nobody wanted to go first. I volunteered.

What I did not know: the wind had nearly stopped between takeoff and jump time. That moved my exit point farther from the airport than planned.

I did everything right. I pushed back from the plane. I arched. I smiled, more or less.

It was not enough. I came down short of the landing zone and settled into a line of trees at the field’s edge. I ended up suspended about 6 feet off the ground, my chute tangled in the branches above me.

And here is where the morning’s four hours came back to me.

Somewhere in the training, an instructor had said: if you land in trees, one hand covers your face, the other protects your groin. It had seemed like a footnote at the time. A contingency nobody actually expected to use.

I used it. The branches did exactly what branches do. The preparation did exactly what preparation is supposed to do.

I landed shaken but unscratched. When the instructor asked where my chute was, I pointed to the line of trees where I had left it hanging in the trees.

THE LESSON THAT STAYED WITH ME

Standing at the edge of that field, picking pine needles out of various places, I thought about what had just happened.

On the way up, the instructor’s three-item rubric had seemed like the whole story. Push back, arch, smile. Simple. Elegant. Sufficient.

Then conditions changed. The wind quit. The landing zone moved. And suddenly, the contingency training, the scenarios we had rehearsed but did not expect to need, was the only thing standing between me and a bad outcome.

Preparation looks unnecessary right up until the moment it is not.

This is not a metaphor I had to stretch to reach strategy work. It is exactly the same dynamic.

When a leadership team builds a problem statement, runs a Possibility Set, and names their priority uncertainties, most of that work will not feel necessary in the moment. The obvious path will look clear. Option A seems fine. Contingency scenarios feel like overhead.

Until conditions change. A competitor moves. A key client leaves. A regulation shifts. A cost assumption turns out to be wrong. Technology evolves.

Teams prepared are not surprised. They recognize the situation. They have already thought through it, at least partially. They respond faster and with more discipline than the teams that skipped the diagnostic work because everything looked fine on a clear day.

The instructor was right. Three things were enough for the jump itself.

He was also right about everything else he taught us.

Both of those things were true at the same time.

Next week: What Would Have to Be True? The core logic test that separates wishful strategy from testable strategy. Tuesday, 10:15 am.

Most leadership teams never actually choose their strategy.

They inherit one. They extend the current year’s plan. They tweak last year’s budget. They launch the initiative that everyone had already agreed to before the offsite began.

What they rarely do is build a genuine set of options and then choose among them.

That is the Possibility Set. And skipping it is why so many strategies feel like the only thing anyone could have done, right up until they stop working.

A choice is only real if there was something else you could have chosen.

THE OPTION A PROBLEM

Here is a pattern I see in almost every planning process I walk into.

The leadership team has been living with a problem for months. They have opinions. They have built convictions. By the time they sit down to do strategy work, Option A is not really on the table. It is the table.

The facilitated discussion, the offsite agenda, the consulting engagement, all of it is structured around arriving at a destination that was already chosen informally, in hallways and one-on-ones, long before the formal process began.

This is not cynicism. It is human. People (all of us) form views. Leaders especially.

But it’s a problem. Because Option A, the obvious move, the safe extension of the current direction, is often the wrong choice. Markets shift. Assumptions decay. Technology changes. What worked last year may not work next year.

Defaulting to the familiar is not strategy. It is inertia with a slide deck.

WHAT THE POSSIBILITY SET IS

The Possibility Set is a structured collection of two or three genuine strategic options. Not variations on a theme. Not slight adjustments to the current plan. Real alternatives that each represent a different answer to the strategic problem you named in the March 31 post, The Strategic Problem Statement.

Each option in the set should pass four tests.

1. It is actually different.

If you squint and Options A and B look the same, you have one option with cosmetic variation. That does not count. A real option takes you somewhere meaningfully different.

2. Someone in the room would choose it.

If no rational person would pick Option C, it is a strawman, not an option. Every option in the set should have a credible case behind it.

3. It is internally consistent.

Each option should have its own logic. Its own target customer, its own value proposition, its own competitive rationale. A half-formed idea is not an option.

4. It forecloses something.

Real strategic choices say no to something. If Option B does not require giving anything up, it is not a real strategy. It is a wish list.

If every option is comfortable, you have not built a Possibility Set. You have built a list of things you were already going to do.

HOW TO BUILD GENUINE OPTIONS

The hardest part of building the Possibility Set is not generating ideas. It is generating ideas that are genuinely different from the current direction.

Here are four moves that reliably surface real options.

Start with the customer, not the product. Ask: Who else could we serve that we currently ignore? What would we have to change to reach them? This often reveals a market adjacency or a segment expansion that the current plan does not consider.

Ask what you would do if your biggest asset disappeared. If you lost your largest client, your lead product, or your most important distribution channel, what would you build instead? Constraint thinking surfaces alternatives that comfort thinking never reaches.

Look at what competitors are not doing. In every market, there are moves no one is making. Sometimes that is because those moves are bad ideas. Sometimes it is because everyone is following the same assumptions. Asking why a space is empty often reveals an option worth considering.

Consider the exit logic. If you were going to sell the company in three years, what would you build to maximize its value? That target state often defines a strategic option that pure operating logic would not generate.

You do not need a dozen ideas. You need two or three that are genuinely different and genuinely defensible.

A STORY ABOUT OPTIONS THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

I worked with a professional services firm that had been growing steadily for a decade. Revenue was solid. The team was good. The obvious Option A was to keep doing what was working, hire more people, and serve more clients in the same segment.

We pushed them to build a real Possibility Set.

Option B: stop serving small and mid-size clients entirely and reposition as a high-fee specialist for a narrower, larger client base. Fewer clients, deeper relationships, significantly higher margins.

Option C: productize their core methodology into a licensed training program and sell it to firms that could not afford their direct fees. Different business model, different growth ceiling, different risk profile.

Option A still won. But it won differently. The team stress-tested it against B and C and came out with sharper clarity about why they were choosing it and what it would require. They made specific commitments they had never made before, around client minimums, service boundaries, and hiring profiles.

That is what a real Possibility Set does. Even when you end up at the obvious choice, you arrive there with more conviction and more discipline. At a minimum, more insight and a little humility.

THE CONNECTION TO CHOICE

In Strategy Is Choice, Not Aspiration (March 3), we covered the idea that strategy is choice, not aspiration. Roger Martin’s framework, the strategy cascade, starts with a winning aspiration and then forces choices about where to play and how to win.

The Possibility Set is where those choices get structured.

You cannot choose where to play if you have only one place on the map. You cannot choose how to win if you have only one theory of winning. The Possibility Set forces the team to put multiple answers on the table before any of them are selected.

This is also where the problem statement from Week 10 does its work. A clear problem statement shapes which options are relevant. If the problem is customer churn, Option A should address churn. If it does not, it belongs in a different conversation.

The Possibility Set is not brainstorming. It is a structured option generated in response to a named problem.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE POSSIBILITY SET

The Possibility Set is not the endpoint. It is the setup for the next moves in the Sprint.

Once you have two or three genuine options, the next question is: what would have to be true for each one to succeed? That is the WWHTBT framework we will cover in the April 21 post. It is the core logic test that separates wishful thinking from testable strategy.

In the Sprint, the Possibility Set typically takes the middle two weeks to build properly. It is not a one-session exercise. Options need to be drafted, challenged, thought about, refined, and stress-tested before they are ready for validation.

Teams that do this well arrive at their final strategy choice with something rare: confidence they can explain. Not just conviction that they are right, but a clear account of what they considered and why they chose what they chose.

Boards respond to that. Investors respond to that. Executive teams execute better because of that.

YOUR MOVE THIS WEEK

Take the strategic problem you identified last week. The one sentence that describes the actual challenge.

Now write down your current answer to it. The direction you are heading. That is your Option A.

Then ask two questions:

• What is a meaningfully different answer to this same problem that a reasonable person could argue for?

• What would we have to give up to pursue it?

If you cannot answer the second question, you haven’t yet found a real option.

That discomfort is useful. It means you are doing strategy, not planning.

Next week: What Skydiving Taught Me About Preparation. A personal piece on why the work you do before the jump determines everything about the jump itself. Connects directly to why the Sprint invests 30 days in diagnosis before committing to direction.

If your team is stuck at Option A and you know it, the Sprint is designed to get you unstuck. Learn more about the Strategy Sprint at Haas Strategy Solutions.

Most leadership teams are solving the wrong problem.

Not because they are careless. Because naming the actual problem is harder than it looks, and skipping that step is faster. So they move straight to solutions, initiatives, and roadmaps built on a problem nobody formally agreed on.

This is the single most common reason strategy fails.

If you solve the wrong problem brilliantly, you still lose.

THE SYMPTOM TRAP

Here is how it usually goes.

Revenue is flat. The leadership team gathers. Someone says the sales team needs better training. Someone else says the product needs a refresh. A third person says the brand is tired and needs a campaign.

Three weeks later, there are three new initiatives underway. Revenue is still flat.

What nobody asked: why is revenue flat?

Flat revenue is a symptom. It could mean many things. Customers are churning faster than new ones arrive. The market segment you serve is shrinking. A competitor has undercut your price. Your best salespeople left. Your product solves a problem customers used to have but no longer do.

Each of those is a different problem. Each requires a different response. Launching a sales training program when the real issue is a shrinking market segment does not fix anything. It just creates activity.

Activity is not strategy. Busy is not the same as effective.

WHY TEAMS SKIP THE PROBLEM STATEMENT

The problem statement step gets skipped for predictable reasons.

It is slow. Writing a clear problem statement requires conversation, debate, and often a few uncomfortable revelations. That takes time. The team would rather start doing.

It is political. The real problem often implicates someone in the room. Naming it means naming whose decisions, assumptions, or territory are part of the issue. That is uncomfortable.

It feels obvious. Leaders often assume everyone already agrees on the problem. They rarely do. The agreement is usually surface-level. Push one layer deeper and the versions diverge fast.

I learned this in the field, watching ecologists describe the same system in completely different terms depending on what they were trained to see. A soil scientist and a wildlife biologist standing in the same wetland see entirely different problems. Leadership teams are no different.

WHAT A REAL PROBLEM STATEMENT LOOKS LIKE

A good problem statement does five things.

• It names the gap between current reality and desired outcome.

• It is specific enough to be falsifiable. You could imagine evidence that says the problem is solved.

• It does not contain the solution. If your problem statement says ‘we need a new CRM,’ that is a solution, not a problem.

• It is short. One to three sentences. If it takes a paragraph to describe the problem, the problem has not been diagnosed yet.

• The leadership team agrees on it. Not nods-in-a-meeting agrees. Actually agrees.

Here is what a weak problem statement looks like:

“We need to grow revenue by improving our go-to-market strategy and investing in customer success.”

That is a solution list dressed up as a problem statement. It assumes the cause and prescribes the response before any diagnosis.

Here is what a stronger version looks like:

“We are losing mid-market customers within 18 months of acquisition at a rate that offsets new customer growth, and we do not have a shared understanding of why.”

That version names the gap, points to what we do not know, and leaves the solution open. Now the team can actually work the problem.

THE PROBLEM BEHIND THE PROBLEM

The most useful discipline in problem statement work is asking one question repeatedly:

“Is that the problem, or is that a symptom of the problem?”

Revenue is flat. Is that the problem? Or a symptom?

Customer churn is high. Problem or symptom?

The sales team is underperforming. Problem or symptom?

Keep asking until you hit something that does not dissolve into a deeper layer. That is the problem worth solving.

In ecology, this is the difference between treating an invasive species and asking why native species stopped competing effectively. One is a response. The other is a diagnosis.

The diagnosis takes longer. It is worth it.

A STORY FROM THE FIELD

Consider a manufacturing company in the mid-Atlantic losing market share. The leadership team was convinced the problem was pricing. A competitor had come in low and was taking contracts.

Now run the problem statement process before anyone touches a spreadsheet.

What surfaces is on-time delivery rate dropped from 94 percent to 81 percent over 18 months. Customers were not leaving because of price. They were leaving because delivery had become unreliable, and the competitor’s lower price made the switch easy to justify.

The pricing problem was real but secondary. The delivery problem was primary.

A pricing response would have cut margin and not stopped the churn. The actual fix was in operations.

They never would have found it without the problem statement work.

HOW THE SPRINT USES THIS

In a Strategy Sprint, the problem statement is the first deliverable and the hardest one. We don’t move forward until the leadership team agrees on it.

This often takes more time than people expect. That isn’t a failure. It’s the work.

Last week, I described the Sprint as delivering clarity before commitment. The problem statement is where that clarity starts. Everything else, the possibility set, the business model canvas, the priority uncertainties, builds on top of it.

A weak problem statement produces a well-executed response to the wrong situation. A clear problem statement makes every subsequent decision faster and more defensible.

Sprint does not guarantee the right answer. It guarantees you are answering the right question.

YOUR MOVE THIS WEEK

Try this before your next planning conversation.

Write down your company’s single most important strategic challenge in one sentence. Then ask two or three of your senior leaders to do the same, independently.

Compare the sentences. Look for three things:

• Do they describe the same gap?

• Do any of them contain a solution hidden inside the problem description?

• Does anyone describe a symptom where someone else describes a root cause?

What you find in that comparison is more useful than most strategy offsite agendas.

That is where the real work begins.

Next week: Building the Possibility Set. Before you choose a direction, you need genuine options on the table. Most teams default to Option A without realizing they never built a real Option B (or C).