From Noise to Clarity | Track 6
COMPLEXITY AND STRATEGY: Why Most Strategies Stay Abstract #10
Complexity and Strategy | Post 10 of 15
Before you read: Think of a strategy you have worked inside that felt clear at the leadership level but became increasingly difficult to translate into specific action the further it travelled through the organisation. Now ask yourself: was the strategy actually clear, or was it clear enough that nobody in the room felt the need to push further?
Why most strategies stay abstract
There is a particular kind of strategic failure that is difficult to diagnose because it does not look like failure from the outside.
The strategy exists. It has been presented, discussed, approved, and distributed. Leadership is aligned. The language is ambitious and the goals are clearly stated. Six months later, ask people throughout the organisation what the strategy means for their work and the answers vary in ways that are difficult to reconcile. Different priorities. Different interpretations. Different assumptions about what matters most. Different actions being taken in the name of the same strategy.
The strategy is present. Execution is struggling. And the gap between them is not caused by poor planning or weak leadership or insufficient commitment. It is caused by something more fundamental and more difficult to address.
The strategy remained abstract. And abstract strategies, however carefully worded and professionally presented, cannot guide the decisions that execution requires.
Post 77 in this track established that shared language is not the same as shared understanding, and that the drawing test consistently reveals how differently people interpret even strategies they have agreed on. This post goes one step further. It examines why abstraction persists even when people recognise its cost, how complexity makes the problem worse rather than better, and why the gap between strategy and execution so reliably widens as the strategy travels down through the organisation.
Visual Prompt 1 Title: Abstract language, different pictures Hand-drawn sketchnote, black ink throughout, blue accents on key elements only, white background, rough sketch aesthetic. A single phrase in a box at the top: “operational excellence.” Below it, four figures each holding a different rough sketch representing their interpretation: a cost reduction chart, a process efficiency diagram, a quality improvement loop, a technology upgrade plan. Blue caption: “one phrase. four strategies. nobody noticed.” Rough sketch aesthetic.
Why abstraction is so difficult to resist
Abstract language in strategy is not an accident. It is a solution to a real problem, which is part of what makes it so persistent.
When a leadership team is working through a strategy, genuine disagreements exist. Different functions have different priorities. Different leaders have different views on where the organisation should focus. Different interpretations of the market produce different conclusions about what matters most. The process of reaching agreement across those differences is uncomfortable. It requires someone to say that this priority matters more than that one, which means telling the person responsible for that one that their area is not the organisation’s primary focus right now.
Abstract language resolves that discomfort efficiently. Customer centricity is a phrase that everyone can support because nobody knows precisely enough what it means to disagree with it. Innovation is a word that the head of technology and the head of operations and the head of finance can all nod at simultaneously because each is nodding at a different thing. The language creates agreement in the room. It does not create alignment in the organisation. But the agreement feels productive, and the meeting moves forward, and the strategy document gets finalised, and the uncomfortable conversations about specific choices and real trade offs are not deferred deliberately. They simply never quite happen.
This is the comfort of abstraction. It allows broad agreement. It preserves relationships. It avoids the friction that genuine strategic choice produces. And it passes the cost of that avoidance forward to the people responsible for execution, who discover only when they try to translate the strategy into specific action that the translation was never completed.
How complexity makes abstraction worse
There is a counterintuitive pattern worth examining directly.
The more complex an environment becomes, the more abstract organisational language tends to get. Not less abstract. More.
As the number of variables increases, as the market becomes harder to read, as the interdependencies multiply and the future becomes genuinely more uncertain, organisations typically respond by adding layers of strategic architecture. More frameworks. More pillars. More categories. More strategic themes sitting above strategic priorities sitting above strategic initiatives. The intention behind this architecture is clarity. The outcome is usually the opposite.
Each additional layer of abstraction is another translation required before the strategy reaches the level at which actual decisions are made. Each framework adds vocabulary that must be interpreted consistently across functions and levels and time zones for the strategy to produce coherent behaviour. Each new pillar creates a new category that people need to understand well enough to know whether their current work sits inside it or outside it.
I have seen organisations with six strategic pillars where every function had reorganised its activities to align with the pillar language, without any two functions agreeing on what the pillars actually meant in practice. The frameworks created the appearance of strategic coherence. The underlying complexity was undisturbed. The organisation had successfully aligned its vocabulary without aligning its thinking.
This is the irony at the centre of how most organisations respond to complexity. The response to complexity that feels most responsible, more structure, more categorisation, more strategic architecture, is often the response that makes the visibility problem worse. Because the question is never whether the framework is sophisticated. The question is whether the people who need to use it can see clearly enough what it is asking them to do.
Visual Prompt 2 Title: More layers, less clarity Hand-drawn sketchnote, black ink throughout, blue accents on key elements only, white background, rough sketch aesthetic. A pyramid with four levels. Bottom level labelled “specific actions.” Above it, “strategic initiatives.” Above that, “strategic priorities.” At the top, “strategic pillars.” Arrows pointing upward from the bottom, getting thinner and less defined as they rise. Blue note beside the pyramid, pointing to the top: “the language gets cleaner as you go up. the connection to action disappears.” Rough sketch aesthetic.
The translation gap
One of the most reliable ways to observe the cost of abstraction is to follow a strategy as it travels through an organisation.
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At the executive level, the language is intentionally broad. Improve customer lifetime value. Build sustainable competitive advantage. Develop organisational capability. These phrases are appropriate at that level because they are describing direction rather than action. They set the frame within which more specific thinking will happen.
At the department level, the language narrows. Strengthen customer retention. Develop people capability in key functions. Improve the efficiency of core processes. The direction from above has been interpreted and translated into something more specific to the department’s work.
At the team level, the translation continues. Improve the onboarding experience for new customers. Run the leadership development programme for middle managers. Reduce the number of steps in the procurement process. Each translation is a reasonable interpretation of the level above it. Each introduces new variation.
At the individual level, the question that actually determines what happens on any given day is not what the strategic pillar says. It is what should I do differently this week. And the answer to that question, if it cannot be traced through the chain of translations back to a specific and visible strategic logic, is whatever the individual’s existing habits and priorities suggest.
This is the translation gap. Not a communication failure in the conventional sense. A structural problem. Each level translates what it received from the level above, and each translation introduces variation, and the accumulated variation across levels and functions and time means that the organisation at the point of execution is often working from a version of the strategy that its architects would not fully recognise.
The gap is not closed by better communication of the abstract strategy. It is closed by making the strategy specific enough at each level that translation is not required, or at least specific enough that the translation has clear enough constraints to remain consistent.
The difference between a strategy that inspires and a strategy that guides
There is a distinction worth making explicit because it clarifies what abstraction actually costs.
Many organisations treat inspiration as the primary purpose of strategy. The strategy should energise people. It should create a sense of direction and momentum. It should make the organisation feel that it is moving toward something worth moving toward. Inspiration matters. It is not nothing.
But inspiration is not the primary job of strategy. The primary job of strategy is to guide decisions.
A strategy that cannot guide decisions when two priorities compete is a strategy that has not yet done its work. A strategy that cannot tell a team which of two projects to resource when the budget runs short is a strategy that remains at the aspiration stage. A strategy that cannot help a leader decide whether to accept or decline an opportunity that sits at the edge of the current focus is a strategy that exists at a level of abstraction too high to be operationally useful.
This distinction matters because inspiration and decision guidance require different levels of specificity. Inspiration can be achieved with a compelling phrase or a vivid image of the future. Decision guidance requires the cause and effect logic that Post 82 described, the specific account of which challenge is being addressed, which choices have been made, what the organisation is deliberately not doing, and how the chosen approach is expected to produce the intended outcome.
Abstract strategies can inspire. They cannot guide. And in complex environments where decisions are being made at every level of the organisation every day, often without access to leadership input, a strategy that only inspires is a strategy that is not doing the work that matters most.
Visual Prompt 3 Title: Inspiring vs guiding Hand-drawn sketchnote, black ink throughout, blue accents on key elements only, white background, rough sketch aesthetic. Two figures facing a decision point, represented by a fork in the road. Left figure holds a banner with the word “innovation” on it. They are standing still, unsure which path to take. Right figure holds a simple sketch showing the challenge, the chosen path, and the reason for the choice. They are walking forward. Blue caption: “inspiration tells you where you want to go. guidance tells you which path to take.” Rough sketch aesthetic.
If this resonates with you
The ideas in this series sit at the heart of the work Sherrie Low and I explore in The S.T.A.R. System: Applying Visual Thinking for Career and Business Success, published by Marshall Cavendish Business. The book is a practical guide to using visual thinking as a structured discipline for clearer communication, stronger decisions, and more confident professional navigation. If you want to go deeper than a series of posts allows, you can find it on Amazon.
Closing reflection
Strategies stay abstract because abstraction is genuinely useful in the short term. It creates agreement. It preserves relationships. It allows a leadership team to reach the end of a planning cycle feeling that something has been decided.
What abstraction cannot do is guide the organisation at the moments that matter most. When two priorities compete and a decision cannot wait. When resources run short and something has to give. When an opportunity arrives that sits at the edge of the current focus and someone has to decide quickly whether it belongs inside or outside.
At those moments, the organisation executes the understanding it has, not the language it agreed on. And the distance between the language and the understanding is precisely the distance that abstraction created and specificity must close.
That work is uncomfortable. It requires naming what the organisation will not do, which means telling people that their priorities are not the organisation’s priorities. It requires making the cause and effect logic explicit, which means exposing it to examination and challenge. It requires following the strategy through the translation chain to the level of individual action, which means discovering where the logic breaks down before execution reveals it in a more costly way.
None of that is easy. All of it is the work.
Where in the strategy you are currently working inside does abstraction still exist, and what specific conversation has not yet been had that would close it?
The next post examines the practical discipline of turning strategy into action. Coming up: “How to turn strategy into action.”
I am Ai Yat Goh, a visual thinking strategist and co-author of The S.T.A.R. System. I write about thinking clearly in a world full of noise. Follow me here on Medium for the rest of this series, or connect with me on LinkedIn www.linked.com/in/aiyatgoh
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