Most strategy documents look alike. A vision. Some values. Four to seven goals with arrows. A slide with a mountain on it.
Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy / Bad Strategy (2011) explains why that rarely helps anyone. We use the book all the time, including when we lead strategy work at Nav. Here's what matters most.
The kernel
According to Rumelt, good strategy has a simple kernel in three parts:
- A diagnosis. What is really going on? A good diagnosis names the critical challenge and turns an overwhelming situation into something you can act on.
- A guiding policy. The overall approach to the challenge. It points in a direction and rules something out.
- Coherent actions. Concrete steps that follow the policy and support each other.
Notice the order. The diagnosis comes first. You can't write a prescription before you know what's wrong with the patient.
Four signs of bad strategy
Rumelt describes four hallmarks. Once you've seen them, you see them everywhere:
- Fluff. Big words dressed up as insight. "User-centred, value-based transformation." What does that mean on an ordinary Tuesday?
- Failure to face the challenge. If the problem has no name, nobody can judge whether the strategy solves it.
- Mistaking goals for strategy. "Grow 20 percent" is a wish. A strategy says how you'll get past what's stopping you.
- Bad strategic objectives. A long, unprioritised list, or goals that just restate the dream.
The key point: bad strategy usually comes from avoiding hard choices. Choosing means saying no to someone. Fluff is what that discomfort looks like on a slide.
What we've learned in practice
Start with the problem, even when everyone wants to start with goals. Goals feel productive, but they're also the easiest place to hide. Spending the first workshops on the situation feels slow. It makes everything after it faster.
Interview before the workshops. People are more honest without an audience. We know where the disagreements are before we walk into the room.
Disagreement is data. When two leaders describe the challenge differently, that is the diagnosis work.
Write the diagnosis in plain language. If it doesn't fit on one page, it isn't finished.
A guiding policy has to rule something out. If nothing gets harder to defend afterwards, it isn't a policy. It's a mood.
Why designers should lead strategy work
Understanding the problem is design work. It's what we do in every discovery phase: we hold off on solutions, dig into what's actually happening and put the mess on the wall so a group can reason together. Rumelt's diagnosis is a problem definition with higher stakes.
Strategy isn't a document. It's a diagnosis you're willing to act on. Start there, and the goals tend to sort themselves out.