I've read somewhere around two hundred strategy documents over the past decade. Sector strategies, corporate strategies, national digital strategies, team-level roadmaps dressed up as strategies. And I'll be honest: most of them have one thing in common, which is that they were written to survive a sign-off meeting, not to be opened again afterward. That's not a moral failing — it's a structural problem, one that shows up in very predictable ways once you know what to look for. I'm still working this out, but I think the difference between a document that shapes decisions and one that sits in a drawer comes down to a surprisingly small number of choices — about structure, about language, and about what the document is actually trying to do for the people who have to use it. This is my attempt to lay those out as clearly as I can.
the approval trap (and why it produces unusable documents) ¶
When a document's primary job is to get approved, every incentive points toward vagueness. Vague language offends fewer stakeholders. Broad goals are harder to argue with than specific ones. A timeline that says 'medium term' can't be proven wrong in the next quarterly review. So the document accumulates softness — 'we will explore', 'we aim to', 'we will consider opportunities to' — until it contains no claim that could embarrass anyone. The problem is that the same properties that make a document safe to approve make it useless to act on. A team trying to decide whether to pursue a partnership, reallocate a budget line, or deprioritize a project needs a document that tells them something. 'We will be a leader in digital innovation' tells them nothing. I think the approval trap is mostly invisible to the people inside it, which is what makes it so persistent.
what 'actually used' looks like in practice ¶
Before fixing anything, it helps to be concrete about what using a strategy document actually means. I don't mean people citing it in presentations (that's performative use). I mean: a team is in a meeting, a decision is on the table, and someone opens the document to check whether the choice in front of them is consistent with the direction it sets. Or a manager uses it to explain to a new hire why certain things are prioritized. Or a director uses it to push back on a request that doesn't fit — 'we decided not to go in that direction, and here's where that's written down.' That's use. It requires the document to be findable, readable in under ten minutes, and to contain sentences that are specific enough to be relevant to a real choice. Most documents fail on all three counts.
the structural choices that matter most ¶
Structure is where I'd start if someone handed me a bad strategy document to fix. The two things I look for first are: does it have a clear logic of 'therefore' rather than 'and also', and does it surface the choices that were rejected? A document that reads 'we will do X, and also Y, and also Z' has probably not made any real strategic choices — it has listed aspirations. A document that reads 'given A and B, we concluded C, which means we are not doing D or E' has actually said something. The rejected options section is the one I find most consistently missing and most consistently valuable. If a team can't articulate what they decided not to do, there's a reasonable chance the strategy hasn't actually been made yet, just described. The other structural move I think is underrated: a short (one page maximum) decision-support index at the front, mapping the kinds of questions the document is meant to answer and the pages where it answers them.
language: the difference between a direction and a decoration ¶
This is the part where I get slightly obsessive, so bear with me. There's a class of words that appear in almost every strategy document and that carry the feeling of meaning without the substance of it. Words like 'leverage', 'foster', 'enhance', 'enable', 'champion', 'ensure alignment'. I sometimes call these decorative verbs — they gesture at action without specifying who does what, by when, or how you'd know it happened. The test I use is simple: can you imagine the opposite? 'We will foster collaboration' — would anyone ever write 'we will discourage collaboration'? If the opposite is absurd, the statement isn't a strategic choice, it's a value decoration. Replace it with something falsifiable: 'by March we will consolidate our three separate project-tracking systems into one, so that any director can see cross-team dependencies in a single view.' That's a direction. It can be done or not done. It implicates specific people. It has a shape.
the reader problem (documents are not written for their actual audience) ¶
Most strategy documents are written for the people who commissioned them — the board, the senior leadership team, the funder. But the people who need to use the document day-to-day are usually one or two levels down: team leads, project managers, operational staff. Those readers have different questions. They're not asking 'is this ambitious enough?' They're asking 'does this tell me what to say yes to and what to say no to?' Writing for approval means writing for the commissioner. Writing for use means writing for the person making the Friday afternoon decision about whether to take on a piece of work. I think the simplest practical fix is to draft a list of eight to ten real decisions the document should be able to inform — not hypothetical ones, but decisions that are actually coming up in the next twelve months — and then check every section of the document against that list. If a section doesn't help with any of those decisions, ask hard questions about whether it needs to be there.
length, format, and the myth of the comprehensive strategy ¶
I've seen strategy documents that run to ninety pages. I've never seen one that was used. There's a widespread belief that length signals seriousness, that a short document couldn't possibly have captured everything. But comprehensiveness and usability are in direct tension. A document that tries to say everything about everything becomes a reference archive, not a navigation tool. The most useful strategy documents I've encountered tend to be in the twelve to twenty page range, with a genuine one-page summary at the front that stands alone — not a table of contents, but an actual condensed argument. Appendices exist for the evidence base, the detailed data, the consultation findings. The core document should be the distillation, not the container. If someone can't get the essential direction from twenty minutes of reading, the document has not done its job of thinking — it has just done its job of documenting.
one thing I keep coming back to: the document needs a maintenance relationship ¶
Even a well-written strategy document becomes useless if nobody owns it after sign-off. I've seen this pattern repeatedly: the document is approved in January, celebrated, shared, and then left entirely static while the world moves around it. By September, teams are making decisions that contradict it, not because they're ignoring it, but because it no longer reflects reality and everyone quietly knows it. The fix isn't complicated but it does require a deliberate decision: someone needs to own the document, review it at a fixed cadence (quarterly works for most organizations), and be empowered to update it or flag when it needs updating. Not a full rewrite — just honest annotation. 'This section reflected our assumptions in Q1; our view on X has since shifted.' A living document that acknowledges its own evolution is far more trustworthy, and more used, than a pristine one that pretends nothing has changed.
I don't think there's a perfect strategy document format — context matters too much for that. But I do think the gap between documents that get used and documents that don't is much more addressable than most organizations realize. It's mostly a series of small, specific choices made (or not made) during drafting. If you're in the middle of writing one of these right now and any of this resonates, I'd genuinely like to hear what you're running into.