Why Most Strategic Processes Miss the Real Work: The Bridges Between Steps
Most strategic processes look quite neat: boxes, arrows, and stages with names like Think, Plan, Execute, and Measure.
But great strategy doesn’t happen in straight lines, and it certainly doesn’t follow neatly bordered processes. It’s shaped in the transitions.
Because the real work isn’t just completing the steps, it’s moving between them, deliberately and collectively.
I once worked with a team that had launched 150 initiatives under their previous strategy. They went straight from mission to motion – without pausing to focus.
No sorting, no sense of priority, and no trade-off discussion. Just leaping into action. As it turned out, action well beyond their capability to manage. A bad case of Mission Creep.
It wasn’t due to laziness and certainly not lack of ambition. It was the absence of a clear bridge.
What they needed was a step I call Focusing – the deliberate narrowing of possibilities into genuine choices. It’s where a team stops collating strategies and starts making trade-offs to commit to a narrower path.
Without it, mission turns into overload, and strategy becomes an inexhaustible to-do list.
Then there are the off-sites that become what I call Idea Karaoke. Everyone sings their favourite strategic song, but no one writes the music together.
The room’s full of post-its and flipcharts, but by the following week, no one can remember what the actual strategy is. No tough choices and no centre of gravity.
That’s what happens when the thinking is divergent, but never converges. The Focusing step closes that loop – bridging imagination to discipline.
Another missed bridge? Mobilising.
That’s the step where the plan becomes something people can actually carry in their hearts and minds. Not a document to present, but a shared story that makes sense across the enterprise, and outside it.
A well mobilised strategy turns direction into understanding and belief, and then into motion. People start seeing their place in the strategy, in a better future that they belong to.
These steps aren’t extras, they’re the connective tissue that turns strategic conversations into real-world movement.
My Strategic Mastery CycleTM names them for what they are:
- Focusing, the choosing process between thinking and planning: where you clarify the best strategic possibilities.
- Mobilising, the communication step between planning and execution: where you engage your entire organisation and stakeholders in your vision.
- Impacting, the act of delivery between the busyness of doing and knowing if it mattered: where you deliver real outcomes.
- Listening, the understanding step between measuring and thinking about what comes next: where you sense the signal-in-the-noise and what to pay attention to in your strategic landscape.
Each one strengthens the bridge between intent and outcome, and each one helps mature your strategic process.
These transitions are what anthropologists call liminal spaces – thresholds and crossing points. In the case of strategy, where a team moves from one state of clarity to the next.
In nature, liminal spaces are abundant. Caterpillars don’t just abruptly change into butterflies. They enter a cocoon – a liminal space where what they were dissolves and reforms. What emerges isn’t a mere extension of the old, but something fundamentally different built from the former.
Strategy is the same. The bridge steps are not just pauses, they are transformation zones.
Or think of filmmaking. After the script is written and the scenes are shot, the story becomes real in the edit. That’s where meaning takes shape – not from using all the footage, but from cutting, sequencing, and shaping what’s there from the collective creative and technical talents of hundreds of contributors.
The best strategic processes don’t just define the steps, they honour the transitions, where the work of one stage is reformed into the substance of the next.
That’s what unlocks real coherence, and that’s what most processes still miss.
© 2025 Matt Walsh. All rights reserved.