Strategy should be painful

Businesses plateau for two reasons:

1. Their strategy is wrong (Wrong Strategy Syndrome)
2. They fail to execute any strategy at all (Fuzzy Strategy Syndrome)

Unfortunately, these two separate problems have identical symptoms (stagnant growth), but opposite cures. If you think your strategy is wrong when it’s really fuzzy, you’ll start to run more experiments and make the problem even worse. And if you think your strategy is fuzzy when it’s really wrong, you’ll prune important projects that could lead to renewed growth, in order to focus on a broken core.

So it’s critically important to get the diagnosis right.

Wrong or Fuzzy?

Of course, it’s always a case-by-case situation, but I recommend starting with Fuzzy Strategy Syndrome as your default assumption.

Here’s why:

In struggling companies, people often subconsciously assume they have Wrong Strategy Syndrome, because it is human nature  to invent new narratives when we’re in trouble. It doesn’t occur to us as easily that the old narrative would work if we implemented it with more focus and clarity. 

Plus, it’s hard to convince your team that the problem might be Fuzzy Strategy Syndrome, because you probably have a lot of meetings and documents and slide decks talking about your strategy. It doesn’t feel fuzzy! But it all amounts to nothing unless you’re good at saying “no” to enticing opportunities that don’t fit the plan. Tangential ideas waste resources and degrade the core customer experience. Retention goes down, CAC goes up, and the growth curve begins to droop.