Good strategy is embedded, not purely abstracted

12/3/2025 ☼ strategy ☼ embedded ☼ abstracted ☼ uncertainty

This is #2 in a series on seven tensions that lead to common misunderstandings about strategy.

Good strategy is embedded, not just abstracted.

A misconception about strategy

Stripped all the way down, strategy is about making decisions under uncertainty. Strategy requires understanding the current situation — what resources you have, what constraints you face — and deciding where you want to go (which must be both different and better). But the path between where you are and where you want to be is never obvious. There’s always uncertainty about what the desired end state should be, and even more uncertainty about how to get there. Strategy, then, is fundamentally about creatively using resources and circumventing constraints to walk an uncertain path.

This makes strategy sound like a conceptual, high-level exercise — a planning process full of charts, models, and frameworks, culminating in a boardroom deck. That’s certainly how strategy is usually approached: As something abstracted away from day-to-day reality, best discussed in air-conditioned meeting rooms, with glossy slides to persuade decision-makers. (Also take a look at my previous article on why strategy is not the same as planning.)

Good strategy acknowledges the importance of the mundane

This view of strategy is not just limited; it’s actively misleading. Good strategy can never be purely abstracted. It must be embedded in the mundane, everyday realities of an organisation.

An example illustrates the downside of abstracted strategy. I once worked with a company that framed its strategic problem as: “We’re not innovative enough. Our competitors release new products twice as fast as we do, and those products gain traction with customers.” They hired an expensive strategy consultancy (one of the usual suspects) which eventually led to a standard boardroom play — budgeting more resources and support for the R&D team. Despite the increased investment, the number of successful product launches barely budged.

Turns out the problem wasn’t a lack of funds. The real problem (not visible without spending a lot of time watching the team work together) was that the R&D team didn’t have a shared language for what made a good product. Without an agreed way to define and assess product potential, the well-intentioned team was unable to make collective decisions about which ideas to invest their limited time in developing. Throwing more money at the problem didn’t fix it. The strategic problem wasn’t one of money; it was a problem with everyday human interaction.

This is why good strategy can never be purely abstract: The seemingly trivial aspects of an organisation matter far more than they get credit for. A team that doesn’t have a clear way to talk about what makes a product “good” will struggle to develop good products — even if it has enough money and headcount and a nice new skunkworks building in a different city to work out of.

Embedded strategy works throughout the organisation, not just at the top

What I’m calling embeddedness here means recognising that every organisation functions on multiple levels. There’s the abstracted level of senior management in the boardroom, but there’s also the ground-level reality of teams and individual contributors (and levels in between). Strategy that only makes sense in the boardroom is often bad strategy. Good strategy needs to be embedded so that it accounts for, makes sense to, and works with the different levels of the organisation. Embedded strategy recognises the importance of the mundane and the unsexy.

Embedded strategy isn’t just useful for avoiding obvious strategy mistakes (like misdiagnosing a problem and throwing resources at the wrong solution). It also enables strategic sophistication that abstract approaches simply can’t see.

In another organisation I worked with, an embedded approach to strategy revealed a hidden but powerful resource and how to turn that into a usable asset. The organisation had an R&D team in which senior members were very productive because they each had an accurate and refined awareness of what made new products stylistically consistent with previous products. Unfortunately, junior members did not have this awareness and were much slower in product development.

An embedded approach revealed that the fastest and most effective way to grow this awareness was by engaging in detailed feedback between team members. The resulting intervention was a weekly team meeting for giving and receiving feedback on any work in progress. This simple, nearly cost-free intervention became the key to speeding up and improving the quality of product development across the entire team. Previously, senior team members held valuable but largely tacit knowledge about what made their products distinctive. Junior team members, lacking consistent access to this knowledge, had to figure things out themselves, slowly.

But with a structured team all-hands discussion every week, senior team members began sharing critical insights in a way that was natural, digestible, and actionable. This solution to the strategic problem (of needing to speed up new product development to stay competitive) didn’t emerge from an abstract strategy exercise. It came from looking deeply at how work was actually getting done and finding underutilised opportunities within existing structures — an embedded approach to strategy.

Embedded strategy makes change easier

The third reason embedded strategy is superior is that strategy inevitably involves changing how organisations work. Change is hard. Even the most carefully planned strategic shift will fail if the people responsible for implementing it don’t understand it, don’t believe in it, or don’t see how it connects to their day-to-day work. Abstracted strategy often fails precisely because it lacks this embedded connection. Abstracted strategy is designed at the top, pushed downward, and resisted at every step.

Embedded strategy, by contrast, is naturally framed in ways that make sense to the people enacting it. When strategy is developed with an awareness of the realities of work on the ground, the resulting changes are not only easier to implement — they are more likely to work and to stick.

Three reasons for embedded strategy

So, embedded strategy is good strategy for three reasons:

It avoids misdiagnosing problems and making obvious mistakes about solutions.
It enables creative, high-leverage interventions by making full use of organisational resources that an abstracted view would not even see.
It makes change more implementable by designing and framing it in ways that resonate with the people who must execute it.

Good strategy doesn’t live in boardroom presentations. It lives in how work actually gets done. If you’re trying to make strategy work better in your organisation, the question to ask isn’t just “What should we do?” but “What should we do that would make sense throughout the organisation?”

If this embedded approach to strategy resonates with you, let’s talk about making it work in your organisation.

I’ve been working on tools for learning how to turn discomfort into something productive. idk is the first of these tools.

And I’ve spent the last 15 years investigating how organisations can design themselves to be good at working in uncertainty by clearly distinguishing it from risk.