Think about the last piece of software your organisation paid for.
It was probably at its best the afternoon you signed. Clean and quick, exactly what the demo promised. Then the updates got thinner, the price went up, and one Tuesday an email arrived to say the version you liked is being retired, and here’s the migration plan. You bought a thing at its peak and watched it slide from there.
We treat that as normal, because it’s just how things are done. And it’s similar for strategy; it’s sharpest the day the plan is handed over, and blunter every quarter after. Then the restructure, announced once and never touched again. Or the brand refresh that looked right in 2022 and still looks like 2022.
Finished is the problem
For a long time I thought the job of a consultant, my job, was to deliver something complete. A proper document, a proper answer, done. Signed off, thank you, invoice attached.
The trouble is that “complete” and “dead” turn out to be the same address. A plan that can’t change stops being true the moment the world moves, which is usually the following Monday, and that means you didn’t buy a strategy, you bought a photograph of one.
The better version is this. Build something small. Put it in front of the people who use it. Let it get better every time they touch it. And teach them how to nurture it themselves.
It’s never finished, and if it’s any good it never will be. It improves underneath you while you get on with your day.
This isn’t a software thing
It’s tempting to file all this under “tech moves fast” and move on. Don’t. The principle has nothing to do with code.
A strategy built this way is one your team helped shape, so they keep shaping it, so it’s still alive at the next away day instead of laminated on a shelf. The same goes for an operating model that bends when the business changes instead of snapping, and a brand that grows up alongside the people who live inside it. Same instinct every time: made with the people who use it, owned by them, and never called finished.
I work this way myself. I built a tool called Coproduce for some of the engagement work I do, and the part I’m proudest of – it’s not a feature. It’s that it keeps changing, shaped by what real people needed and I hadn’t thought of. I didn’t ship it and walk away. It gets better most weeks, and plenty of the improvements were somebody else’s idea.
That’s the opposite how most people see a strategy. And friend, let me tell, you it’s hard work, because you never get the clean moment of “this is done.”
The thing on your shelf
So a question, and it’s a slightly uncomfortable one.
What have you got that was “finished” a year ago?
The strategy from the last planning day. It could be the process everyone agreed to and no one has opened since. Or possibly a system you paid good money for that people now work around rather than with. Somewhere in your organisation is something that was signed off, filed, and left to rot. I want you to tell me about it. Book a meeting and tell me how it worked, and how it doesn’t
If something you built has gone stiff, tell me where it’s stuck. I read every one.
