Seven strategy tensions … and misunderstandings

10/3/2025 ☼ not-knowing ☼ risk ☼ uncertainty ☼ meaningmaking ☼ strategy

Seven often-misunderstood strategy tensions

There are seven misunderstandings when it comes to strategy, which are all in the diagram above. These misunderstandings are more properly understood as the positions people take in relation to fundamental tensions in understanding and doing strategy. I’ll write about each one, because my positions on these seven tensions make up my unique view of what strategy is and how it should be done.

1. Strategy is not the same as planning.
2. Good strategy is highly embedded in everyday human interactions and organizational processes, and is not just the abstracted slides that show up in boardrooms.
3. Good strategy recognizes that affect and emotion are as important as cognition and analysis.
4. Good strategy must be tradeoffs-oriented, not just goals-oriented.
5. Good strategy is often made up of small and illegible actions, not just big and legible actions.
6. Good strategy usually consists of a highly distributed profusion of actions, not a small number of highly centralized actions.
7. Good strategy is usually amorphous and emergent, not clear and stable.

Ultimately, these seven common misunderstandings are because we want strategy to be comforting: tried-and-tested planning processes that result in clear, legible, neat, stable, easily communicated sets of actions (the stuff on the right).

Unfortunately, since strategy deals directly with uncertainty, it can only be effective if it is uncomfortable, messy, emergent, and changeable (the stuff on the left).

Therein lies the challenge. Having worked with for-profits organizations, governments, and international organizations for several years, I’ve noticed that a crucial first step to doing good strategy is recognizing these misunderstandings and dispelling them internally.

Book some time below if you’d like to talk about implementing these insights in your organization.

I’ve been working on tools for learning how to turn discomfort into something productive and generative. 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 uncertainty from risk.