Most organizations believe they have a strategy. They have a document, a planning cycle, a leadership team that has signed off on a set of priorities, and a communications programme that has distributed those priorities through the organization. What they often do not have — what the research suggests the majority of large organizations across all sectors lack — is a genuine answer to the question that strategy actually requires: how will we create superior value for the people we serve, in a way that is distinctive from and better than the alternatives available to them?
The absence of that answer is not a documentation failure. It is a thinking failure. And it produces a predictable quality of outcome: organizations that are well-resourced, well-managed, and analytically capable, persistently delivering results that fall short of what their capability should produce.
The evidence of absence
This is the global senior executive population — not struggling organizations but well-resourced ones with sophisticated planning infrastructure. The executives who gave these answers had strategic documents. They had undergone planning cycles. What they were acknowledging was that the output of those cycles was not, in any meaningful sense, a strategy. It was a plan: a set of activities, resource allocations, and aspirations that described what the organization intended to do without articulating why it would succeed.
The distinction matters because it determines what happens when the plan meets execution reality. A genuine strategy — one with a defensible theory of competitive advantage, explicit choices about where to compete and where not to, and a coherent set of capabilities concentrated on the spaces that matter — provides the decision-making framework that allows leaders at every level to navigate the inevitable tradeoffs of execution. When the plan falls short, they know what to protect and what to sacrifice. When a noncustomer emerges, they know whether to pursue it or stay focused. When a partnership offer arrives, they know whether it reinforces their position or dilutes it.
A plan without a strategy provides none of this. Every execution decision is made in a vacuum, because there is no coherent theory of advantage to navigate by. The inevitable result is drift — organizations that meant to go one place and end up, through a series of locally rational decisions, somewhere else entirely.
The single-page test
Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley's work on the Strategic Choice Cascade proposes a simple diagnostic: can the leadership team articulate the organization's strategy on a single page, answering five specific questions in sequence? What is our winning aspiration — not our mission, but the specific outcome we are trying to achieve for the people we serve? Where will we play — which markets, customers, channels, and geographies are in scope, and which are explicitly out? How will we win — what is our specific theory of competitive advantage in the spaces we have chosen? What capabilities must we have to deliver on that theory? And what management systems must reinforce those capabilities?
The test is not a formatting exercise. It is a thinking exercise. Organizations that can answer all five questions in specific, non-generic terms, with each answer constraining the ones that follow, have a strategy. Organizations that cannot — whose answers to "how will we win" are "operational excellence" or "customer focus" or "innovation" — have aspirations but not strategy. The distinction becomes visible the moment the document is tested against it.
What "What would have to be true?" unlocks
Martin's most useful facilitation question for building genuine strategy is: "What would have to be true for this strategic choice to be the right one?" The question is powerful because it separates the logic of the choice from the existing data. It forces the group to articulate the assumptions — about the market, about the organization's capabilities, about the behavior of competitors and customers — that must hold for the strategy to succeed. Those assumptions are then visible, discussable, and testable. The strategy no longer lives in the document. It lives in the conditions its own logic requires.
Organizations that build strategy this way — that can name the conditions required for their choices to be right — are the ones that can adapt when those conditions change. They know what they are watching for. They know what would falsify their current direction. And they have built the honest conversation that makes changing course a strategic decision rather than an admission of failure.
The organizations in MMG's primary sectors — life sciences, government, not-for-profit — share a structural tendency to produce plans rather than strategies, for reasons that are understandable and consequential. The first step is naming the difference clearly enough to do something about it.