The Meaning of Strategy
In the biblical story of Babel, humans begin building a tower to reach heaven. Seeing their hubris, God breaks their unity by making them speak different languages. Unable to understand each other, the builders fall into conflict, ultimately abandoning their bold efforts.
In his 1928 woodcut of the Tower of Babel, Escher depicts the breakdown. “The work is at a standstill,” Escher wrote, “because they can no longer understand one another.” His interpretation captures something important about human ambition. The Tower of Babel wasn’t halted by physical limitations, lack of resources, or shared enthusiasm. It was undermined by an inability to communicate due to the lack of a common language.
Cognitive scientists have shown that shared language does more than just facilitate communication; it actually shapes how teams process information and make decisions. When groups lack common definitions for key concepts, they don’t just communicate poorly; they literally think about problems differently. This cognitive divergence becomes particularly acute when dealing with abstract concepts like strategy, where the gap between different mental models can grow increasingly wider over time.
The relevance of Escher’s wooodcut and this cognitive science to modern strategy is important. In organizations around the world, inspired and talented leaders set out to channel their ambitions through bold strategies. They bring deep expertise, sophisticated tools, and genuine personal commitment. Yet too often their efforts fall short. Not because of unsurmountable capability or resource constraints, but because of something more fundamental: they lack a shared understanding of what “strategy” actually means.
Research shows that only a fifth of executives report their top teams are completely aligned on what constitutes high-quality strategy, and top performers are more likely to be. Those that don’t are running the risk of trying to build their own towers of Babel.
When teams lack a shared understanding of strategy’s meaning, they inevitably struggle to design and mobilize it effectively. They talk past each other. They waste energy and time while opportunity and competition pass by. Their tower rises, but not as high or strong as it could. And it’s why I introduce a definition for strategy in every session I have with executives that even vaguely touches the topic.
The Challenge of Strategy
“Strategy” gets pressed into service for everything from long-term visions to quarterly targets, from cultural aspirations to operational plans. Like the builders on Escher’s tower, leaders use what seems like the same word while meaning very different things.
For some, strategy is about setting direction — articulating where the organization should go. For others, it’s sophisticated planning — detailed roadmaps of how to get there. Still others equate strategy with operational excellence, viewing it primarily as the pursuit of better execution. Each interpretation captures something valuable about leadership. Vision matters. Planning is crucial. Excellence in execution is vital. But none of them fully captures what strategy means. More importantly, treating any of them as strategy creates specific blind spots that can undermine an organization’s ability to succeed.
When strategy becomes synonymous with vision, organizations often fail to make the hard choices about how to realize that vision. When it’s reduced to planning, they can miss emerging opportunities and threats that don’t fit the plan. When strategy becomes operational excellence, organizations risk optimizing their current position while missing shifts that could undermine it entirely.
This isn’t just semantics. When teams operate with different definitions of strategy, predictable failures emerge. Decision-making slows as teams understand and evaluate choices differently. Resources scatter across competing priorities, each strategic in its own frame. Middle managers, tasked with translating strategy into action, receive mixed signals about what matters most. Without a shared definition, strategy cannot be crafted well, let alone realised effectively.
The History of Strategy’s Meaning
As Lawrence Freedman details in the first chapter of The New Makers of Modern Strategy, the definition of strategy has historically not been straightforward. In its earliest formal usage, strategy occupied an ambiguous position between science and art. Initially appearing in military dictionaries of the 1800s as “the art or science of military command,” the term resisted precise definition. This ambiguity reflected deeper tensions in military thinking between those who sought to reduce warfare to mathematical principles and those who emphasized intuition in command, a tension that would need to be resolved as warfare grew more complex.
By the late nineteenth century, the term had begun to transcend its purely military origins. The evolving nature of warfare, with its increasing complexity and societal implications, demanded a broader and more precise understanding of strategy. Military commanders and civilian theorists alike grappled with defining its scope and relationship to policy. This definitional challenge was not merely academic: it reflected fundamental questions about the relationship between means and ends, between planning and execution, and between theory and practice. The challenge persists today, but doesn’t need to, at least in a business context.
The late strategy theorist Colin S. Gray captured an essential truth in his book The Strategy Bridge when he described strategy as a purpose-built bridge connecting intent to action. The definition I prefer reflects this understanding and is a variant of one introduced over thirty years ago by McKinsey experts that has stood the test of time: strategy is a coherent set of hard-to-reverse choices, made in the face of uncertainty, to develop and sustain competitive advantage, in order to create and capture value. Each element of this definition matters, which is why I’ve explored them over my last four posts:
- Strategy is about choices
- Strategy is about uncertainty
- Strategy is about competitive advantage
- Strategy is about creating and capturing value
I like this definition because it sets a high bar for what strategy is. It distinguishes strategy from other important organizational activities like vision-setting, planning, and operational excellence. It reflects strategic themes and pillars as insufficient. It clarifies the value and place of “strategic” things like strategic thinking, underlying strategic logic, strategic insights, strategic fit (for those familiar with Patterns of Strategy), and strategic narratives to what strategy really is: the coherent set of bold moves that will align an organization to create and capture disproportionate value.
As a result, this definition can meaningfully act a shared language that enables more effective strategic dialogue and decision-making. And when a high bar is held for strategy, the resulting strategy does work for the strategy executive.
Making Strategy (Do) Work
One of the most powerful assets a strategy executive has is well-defined strategy. A coherent set of hard-to-reverse choices that meets the bar set out above helps people understand what the strategy is, what it is not, and thus both relate their own roles to it and make decisions using it. It is also something that facilitates learning through and evolution of strategy. It pains me to see strategists that are burdened by a poorly defined strategy due to poorly defined understanding of what strategy means and where its bar is, who are forced to spend a lot of their and their teams’ time, capacity, and social capital compensating for its lack of clarity.
The research accompanying the McKinsey HBR article that introduces the definition of strategy I prefer to use, linked in the previous section, sets out four phases of maturity found in organisation’s approach to strategy. Few organizations today, and in 1980, achieve the fourth phase, which at its core requires an organization-wide understanding of what strategy means, and a culture and either rituals or formal processes that reinforce its bar. When you walk into companies with highly strategic cultures such as Apple, Blackrock, Danaher, and Nvidia you feel everyone understands what strategy means, even if everyone may not have the same exactly definition when asked. But while an explicit definition may not be the hallmark of this highest phase of maturity, it is an essential tool to climb the maturity curve towards it.
As mentioned at the beginning, cognitive science has shown that shared language shapes how teams process information by influencing their mental models. This dynamic takes on new significance as AI systems — from analytical tools used by humans to automated decision-making processes and increasingly autonomous AI agents — become more deeply embedded in strategic processes. The imperative for and value of shared understanding of what strategy means and where its bar lies will only grow stronger as these human-AI dynamics become more central to organizational decision-making. Without it, we risk creating not just human towers of Babel, but hybrid human-AI ones where misalignment of understanding could be even more profound.
Beyond the Tower
Let’s return one final time to Escher’s Tower of Babel. Its power lies not just in depicting the chaos of failed communication, but in suggesting what might have been possible. With shared language, the tower could have reached its ambition.
The same is true for the craft of strategy today. When organizations establish a clear, shared understanding of what strategy means, they unlock their ability to build something remarkable, not just individually dream it.
