The problem with most organisations' strategies

Our principal at 2nd Road, Tony Golsby-Smith, recently wrote an interesting article for the Journal of Business Strategy: "The second road of thought: how design offers strategy a new toolkit" (Vol 28, No. 4, 2007).

He claims that the only way you can do strategy well is to reconceive it as an exercise in "design". I'll get to this later. But what's clearly prompted him to make this claim is the state of strategy in most organisations we see. There is a clear disconnect between what strategy could, and should, do in most organisations, and what it actually ends up doing.

As Tony says, "strategy should be the process that enables organisations to create new futures and engage their people in that exciting task". But too often "it weighs an organisation down with more data and inputs". Too often, organisations' strategies miss the vital elements of "coherence", "energy" and excitement.

The solution? See strategy as a design exercise. Not an analytics exercise. But how do we start to get our heads around "design"? By looking at the first principles of design thinking. And they can be found in the realm of rhetoric. So to start this journey, we'd better talk about rhetoric and the "two roads" story.