Strategy is not a fixed aspiration.

Rethinking aspirations, planning cycles, and the complexity we're actually in.

We must move on from the idea that strategy is a five—or ten–year plan—a fixed vision we march toward. It's comforting fiction: plot the course, cascade the goals, align the incentives. But strategy doesn't live in Gantt charts or glossy roadmaps. It lives in relationships, tensions, and how we continually navigate change.

The dominant model still treats strategy as a destination: define your "winning aspiration," build the plan, and measure progress. This might feel like clarity, but it's built on an assumption that the terrain is stable and the path is known. That assumption no longer holds.

“Strategy isn’t about reaching a fixed point — it’s how we stay viable as our assumptions change.”

Where did this orthodoxy come from?

The five-year planning cycle wasn't born in boardrooms. It came from state-led industrial planning. The USSR's first Five-Year Plan, launched in 1928, was about command and control: rigid targets, centralised planning, and enforced discipline. China adopted the same model in the 1950s. In both cases, planning was about imposing predictability on a turbulent environment, with mixed results.

Western corporations borrowed this logic in the post-war era. Long-range planning became a hallmark of "professional management," influenced by a misapplied understanding of military doctrine, operations research, and financial control. By the 1980s and 90s, strategic planning had softened into something more palatable: the rise of the vision statement.

The idea was to inspire, rally, and align people around a shared sense of direction. Then came the "winning aspiration," popularised by Lafley and Martin in Playing to Win. It positioned aspiration as the foundational choice from which all other strategic decisions cascaded.

But here’s the issue: it’s not that you shouldn’t have an aspiration. Starting with one, before you understand your structural couplings and the context in which you're operating, is backwards.

"Intent should not precede understanding. it should emerge from how you relate to your environment.”

You can't architect intent without knowing the ecosystem you're coupled with, and you don't get clarity by skipping orientation.

Intent should emerge from the relationships.

Strategic intent emerges from your evolving connections with customers, partners, suppliers, regulators, and internal tensions in uncertain and complex environments. It's not declared from a boardroom whiteboard session. It unfolds through repeated interactions and patterns of shaping and response.

"Strategy lives in the manoeuvres — not the mission statement."

That’s why I prefer intent to aspiration. It speaks to directionality and orientation, not just ambition. When strategy is framed as “winning,” we turn it into a competition, which might make sense in consumer goods but collapses in public services, social ecosystems, or multi-actor systems.

Many organisations today in healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and education operate in ecosystems where collaboration is just as vital as competition. Their strategies don’t fit neatly into 1980s quadrant diagrams or "top right corner" typologies. They’re shaped by balancing tensions, building capacity, negotiating trade-offs, and maintaining legitimacy across multiple stakeholders.

Ask a local authority or NHS trust to define their “winning aspiration,” and you’ll often get polite confusion or performative nonsense. Their aim isn’t to win; it’s to remain viable in a contested, dynamic, multi-stakeholder environment.

Viability, not victory

As Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety reminds us, to remain viable, a system must match the complexity of its environment. That doesn’t mean spinning faster. It means building internal structures that can absorb ambiguity and adjust meaningfully.

This is why decentralised execution matters, not as a management fad, but as a strategic necessity. It allows organisations to respond at the edge and absorb variety without constantly escalating decisions up the hierarchy.

This is also why an organisation’s strategy can’t be reduced to an annual workshop and shiny PowerPoint deck. In uncertainty, strategy is a continuous pattern, not a deliverable.

“Strategy isn’t a document. It’s a pattern of action and adaptation.”

As I wrote in Shaping Strategy Through Dynamic Orientation, strategy is less about finding the answer and more about staying in the right kind of movement. It’s the flow of orientation over time.

From static fit to dynamic patterning

This is the thinking behind Patterns of Strategy: strategy is about changing your fit with the environment over time, through differential use of power and time. Fit isn’t a static alignment to a chosen target. It’s an active, relational process.

And ambiguity isn’t something to fear. As I argued in The Strategic Ambiguity Advantage, ambiguity is often a source of resilience in a volatile system. It keeps options open. It allows for manoeuvre.

"In complexity, ambiguity isn’t weakness — it’s what keeps options open.”

Heinz von Foerster said it best: "I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices."

To be clear, this isn’t an argument against direction. But direction must be grounded in context. In structural coupling, not fantasy projection. If you're setting "winning aspirations" without understanding your constraints and relationships, you're not doing strategy — you're doing brand theatre.

What replaces the five-year plan?

Not chaos. Not indecision. But cadence. Rhythm. The ongoing work of strategic orientation — enacted locally, informed systemically.

So instead of asking, “What’s our winning aspiration?”, let’s ask:

• What tensions are shaping us right now?

• Where is our orientation drifting?

• What relationships are structuring our manoeuvrability?

Because strategy isn’t a destination. It’s a pattern of how we move through complexity — and we’re already in the middle of it.