Staying Big Picture: How Executive Teams Can Hold Strategic Altitude
Strategic conversations lose power when they lose altitude.
You know the pattern, a workshop begins with ambition and intent. But within twenty minutes, someone raises an operational issue, and the room follows it down. Instead of holding the long view, you’re fixing a staffing issue, unpicking budget blowouts, or workshopping system pain points.
The shift is subtle, and often well-meaning. A colleague wants to be heard, another nods…. toxic politeness sets in. Before you know it, the strategy conversation has been hijacked by the immediate.
And it’s not rare. It’s not necessailry a failure of discipline. It’s a natural gravity that pulls teams out of the strategic domain – unless they learn to resist it.
The Drift Is Predictable. The Damage Is Strategic.
Major General Mick Ryan, in his excellent paper Thinking About Strategic Thinking, puts it starkly:
“Mistakes in operations and tactics can be corrected, but strategic mistakes live forever.”¹
That line should give every executive team pause. Because what often feels like a harmless detour – a five-minute aside into systems, service quality, or overdue upgrades – can derail the one conversation that most needs protection.
Strategy isn’t just planning, it’s the domain where the big bets are made. Where you shape your future position and where errors can be existential. This is because, as the great strategic thinker Robert Burgelman wrote:
“Successful and unsuccessful strategies shape a company’s destiny.”²
Staying strategic can be the real difference you make in the long run, the difference between being a solid manager and administrator of your responsibilities, to someone who genuinely shaped the future of the enterprise, leaving an indelible mark.
I was fortunate to learn this from a great mentor when I was a young executive, who kept encouraging me to hold the space for the long-term:
“If you’re not projecting yourself into the 2–5 year space, you’ve been captured by the immediate.”
That thought, going into every executive meeting, board meeting, and strategy workshop, paid off when we become #1 in our sector – from a standing start at #12.
Yet organisations rarely train for this type of altitude. They train for action, for detail, and for solving the thing in front of them. So it’s no surprise that most teams need help to stay strategic – to stay above the weather line of day-to-day delivery.
Three Domains. One Crucial Distinction.
In my facilitation work, I often map the room’s conversation into three levels:
- Operational/Tactical (Ground Level) – Fixing what’s broken, meeting delivery demand, and staying afloat.
- Strategic Planning (Mid Altitude) – Aligning programs, priorities, and resources to a known direction.
- Strategic Thinking (High Altitude) – Reframing the game, imagining a different future, and setting long-range direction.
Each has value, but without shared language, they blur. Teams drift downward without realising they’ve left the domain where their biggest impact resides.
One session springs to mind: A CEO was guiding their team through future scenarios when the Head of Customer Services interrupted –
“How can we think five years out when we can’t even keep staff? Our payroll system is a mess.”
It’s a fair challenge, and a familiar one. Moments later, the Head of Marketing chimed in:
“We’re talking 50% growth, but we’re not even funding the brand today.”
Valid concerns, but left unchecked, they anchor the conversation in today’s limitations, not tomorrow’s possibilities.
Name the Gravity. Then Neutralise It.
What’s needed isn’t dismissal, it’s containment.
Capture those concerns, honour them as genuine operational enablers or barriers. Then park them in a “flight log” – a visible space that says this matters, but not here…. We’ll return to it after we’ve mapped the high-altitude terrain.
That moment of respectful containment is what keeps the room at the right altitude.
Over time, teams can learn this discipline themselves. They develop the muscle memory to notice the drift, to gently name it. To say in their own words the following sentiment:
“Let’s acknowledge and return to that in a separate conversation, and honour this strategic space we’ve committed to, stay high level and big picture, just for now.”
And they say it with respect, not as a shutdown, but as a commitment: To each other, to the process, and to the real work of strategy.
This is the type of language that keeps executive teams at altitude – polite containment coupled with shared commitment.
You Are the Strategic Altitude.
Here’s the hard truth for executive teams: There’s no secret committee coming to do this work for you. As Mark Strong’s character says in the movie Zero Dark Thirty:
“There’s no working group coming to the rescue.”³
It’s not just the CEO’s role. It’s not the strategy team’s role (if you even have one). It’s not the board’s job. And it’s not something to outsource to a consulting firm.
You’re it.
If the executive team isn’t doing it, no one is. You are the altitude, only you can hold the frame. You shape the future, or no one does.
That’s why building the strategic ritual matters. Setting aside the time, holding the space, and learning to climb (and stay) above the gravitational pull of now.
Staying Strategic
Staying strategic isn’t easy. It takes shared language, practice and maturity. But it’s learnable, and more essential than ever, because the conversations that shape your future can’t be run at ground level.
Footnotes
¹ Mick Ryan, Thinking About Strategic Thinking: Developing a More Effective Strategic Thinking Culture in Defence, The Vanguard Occasional Paper Series, No.1, Australian Department of Defence, April 2021.
² Robert A. Burgelman, Strategy Is Destiny: How Strategy-Making Shapes a Company’s Future, Free Press, 2002.
³ Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, written by Mark Boal, Columbia Pictures, 2012. Quote attributed to a senior CIA character during a mission briefing scene.
© 2025 Matt Walsh. All rights reserved.