Strategy as a way of being, not an output

The pursuit of viability, not the production of documents

Too often, we talk about strategy as if it were an artefact. Something you produce, publish, and put on a shelf. A plan, a framework, a deck.

But strategy is not a thing. It is not an output.

Strategy is a way of being.

It is lived. It is enacted. It is a way of thinking, a way of behaving, and most of all, the ongoing pursuit of viability.

The trap of outputs

Treating strategy as an output creates the illusion that strategy is “done.” A strategy is launched, a vision is set, and a plan is signed off. Yet real organisations don’t live in static environments where that makes sense.

As Stafford Beer showed through the Viable System Model, viability is never an end state. It is the continuing ability to adapt to a changing environment while maintaining identity. That capacity cannot be written once and filed away. It has to be enacted daily.

When strategy is reduced to an output, organisations lock themselves into confirmation bias. They start proving the plan right instead of asking whether they are still viable.

Strategy as a goal is a dangerous fiction

Another confusion is treating strategy as if it were a goal, a point on the horizon to reach.

If we see strategy as an end state, we narrow our field of vision. We become biased towards confirming that we are “on track,” blind to signals that suggest otherwise. Strategy becomes about validation, not adaptation.

This is when the loop closes. Orientation is lost. Weak signals are ignored. Emergent opportunities are dismissed because they don’t fit the path we’ve already committed to.

But when we understand strategy as the pursuit of viability, the field of view opens. We notice affordances and possibilities for action that we didn’t anticipate. We see adjacent possibilities: pathways that only emerge because of how our actions have interacted with the external environment.

This openness is what gives resilience. It is what makes an organisation adaptive.

Continuous adaptation

Organisations produce their own behaviours over time, often in ways that surprise us. Small actions can amplify, large actions can dissipate, and nothing is linear.

That’s why strategy cannot be about a final answer. It must be about cultivating the capacity to continuously adapt.

Real strategy lives in the cycle of sensing, orienting, deciding, and acting — over and over again. Not in the milestones, but in the manoeuvres.

Futures as present sensemaking

Futures work supports this process, but not because it predicts the future. The value of futures is in expanding the present orientation.

Ray Ison frames systemic practice as “juggling” between being, engaging, contextualising, and managing performance. Futures are part of that juggle. They don’t tell us what 2030 will look like. They sharpen our ability to act wisely in 2025.

By exploring scenarios, rehearsing uncertainties, and surfacing assumptions, futures create room for choice in the present. They help us remain open to the adjacent possibles.

Manoeuvre, not milestone

Patterns of Strategy defines strategy as changing our fit with the environment to our advantage by differential use of power and time.

That definition treats strategy as manoeuvres. A dance of moves and countermoves. I shift, you respond, I shift again.

Organisations are structurally coupled with customers, partners, regulators, suppliers, and competitors. Every action alters the relationship. Every manoeuvre changes the game.

When strategy is treated as a milestone, all of this is ignored. When it is treated as a manoeuvre, it becomes alive.

Habits of living strategy

If strategy is a way of being, then the habits we practise matter more than the documents we produce. The Habits of a Systems Thinker highlight some of the essentials:

• Seeing the big picture rather than fragments.

• Recognising patterns over time rather than reacting to events.

• Testing assumptions rather than treating them as truths.

• Considering unintended consequences rather than focusing only on the intended.

• Using feedback to adapt rather than sticking rigidly to plan.

These are not glamorous. They don’t look like “outputs.” But they are what make organisations viable.

A different lens

Boards and executives often demand artefacts: a deliverable, a roadmap, a plan. But those are not the substance of strategy. They are, at best, snapshots of thinking at a moment in time.

The substance of strategy is how an organisation behaves when the environment shifts, when assumptions collapse, when unexpected affordances appear.

Strategy is not something you have. It is something you are.

The real question

The question to ask is not: “Do we have a strategy?”

It is: “Are we living strategically?”

That means treating strategy not as an output or an endpoint, but as a constant process of thinking, reorientation, and adaptation.

It means being open to the emergent, resilient in the face of uncertainty, and willing to reframe.

Because strategy, lived as a way of being, is never “done.” It is a pursuit of viability.