Strategy Needs to Be Built, Not Bought
By: Charlie Ursell
Designing strategy that survives contact with reality
Most organizations are not short on strategy.
They are short on strategies that survive contact with reality.
Across mining companies, government departments, and multi-stakeholder partnerships, we see the same pattern repeat itself. Strategy is developed by a small group of leaders or experts, packaged into a compelling narrative, and launched with real energy.
For a moment, it feels like progress.
Then people return to their day jobs. Competing priorities reassert themselves. The strategy becomes something that exists alongside the work, rather than shaping it.
This is not a failure of ambition or intelligence.
It is a failure of design.
Buy-in is not ownership
Top-down strategy often looks efficient. It is faster, cleaner, and easier to control.
But it rarely reflects the day-to-day realities of how work actually happens. At best, it creates buy-in. People understand the direction and may even support it.
What it does not create is ownership.
When strategy is shaped only at the top, the people responsible for implementing it are left to interpret and translate it on their own. That translation gap is where strategies quietly unravel.
By contrast, when leaders set direction and the people closest to the work help build the path forward, something different happens.
The strategy stops being abstract.
It becomes embedded in how people think, decide, and act.
It gets adopted.
Then absorbed.
Strategy is about making trade-offs visible
One of the clearest signals that a strategy will fail is when it only adds work.
Many strategies describe what an organization will focus on next, without creating the conditions for people to meaningfully let go of what no longer fits. The result is overload. More priorities layered onto already full plates.
The hardest and most important strategic choices are rarely enforced successfully from the top.
They emerge when people are given the space, information, and context to see for themselves that an initiative they care about is no longer serving the organization as a whole.
This is a design conversation, not a compliance exercise.
Through well-designed collective sensemaking, people do not just understand why something needs to stop. They decide it. And that decision holds in a way no directive ever could.
Some projects will still have to end. Many of them were created with care, pride, and good intentions. If they have been around a long time, they were likely built for a different world.
People love what they design and own what they create.
The power of shared ownership is that when people are part of seeing the shift, they are also part of letting go.
Emergent does not mean undisciplined
Collaborative strategy is often misunderstood as slow, messy, or indecisive.
In reality, collaboration without boundaries is what creates drift.
Every organization has non-negotiables. The courage is in naming them clearly and early. Pretending everything is open for collaboration is a recipe for frustration and false consensus.
Collaboration is expensive. It requires time, focus, and care. It only works when it is deliberately designed around the questions that genuinely require collective intelligence.
Discipline shows up through:
Clear intent and direction from leadership
Explicit parameters for where collaboration is, and is not, needed
Processes that focus energy and prevent drift
Decisions that are made, not deferred
Emergence happens within a field that has been thoughtfully set.
Built strategies last
Strategy that is built with people, not bought from experts, takes longer up front. It asks more of leaders. It requires listening, honesty, and a willingness to make real trade-offs visible.
But it pays off where it matters.
In decisions that align without constant enforcement.
In priorities people can explain and defend.
In strategies that shape behaviour, not just language.
That is the difference between a strategy that looks good on paper and one that actually works.
