When Strategy Stopped Meeting Reality

How comfort, control, and performance theatre stripped the movement out of strategy

Strategy was once a living craft. In ancient Greece, strategos described a commander who turned uncertainty, terrain, and limited resources to their advantage. It was not a concept to be discussed; it was a role to be lived. The strategist stood at the edge of the unknown, interpreting shifting conditions and acting through others to shape outcomes.

Centuries later, Sun Tzu refined this same instinct. He saw strategy as the art of movement. The wise commander flowed like water, shaping to circumstance, striking where resistance was weakest, and staying coherent amid chaos. The strategist gained advantage not through prediction, but by sensing and adapting faster than others.

In the twentieth century, John Boyd returned to this idea of movement. His OODA loop—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—was not a process map but a theory of survival. Whoever could re-orient faster than the environment changed would hold advantage. Strategy, in every age, has been about orientation under pressure.

They taught that advantage depends on the agility of mind, not the abundance of means. Yet this truth, once the foundation of strategy, has been lost.

From Movement to Management

Somewhere between the field, the factory, and the boardroom, strategy lost that instinct. The industrial age rewarded control. Bureaucracy rewarded predictability. The strategist became a manager of process rather than a leader of manoeuvre.

This drift replaced tempo with templates. Plans multiplied while motion decayed. Each new layer of hierarchy added interpretation, friction, and delay. Decisions lost their immediacy; feedback lost its force. Organisations slowed to the pace of their own paperwork.

The result is what many describe as the strategy–execution gap. But execution does not fail because people lack discipline. It fails because organisations lose their capacity to move. Internal inertia—the weight of comfort, procedure, and performance management, keeps them locked in place even as they talk about agility.

Boyd called this losing orientation: when your internal model of reality no longer matches the external world. Strategy does not fail because the plan was wrong; it fails because the organisation cannot re-orient fast enough to keep the plan alive.

The Civilising of Strategy

When strategy left the battlefield, it was softened for corporate life. The language of friction and constraint became the language of consensus and comfort. Adversaries turned into stakeholders. Manoeuvre turned into alignment.

In the process, we built a new mythology around leadership itself. We began treating belief as causation: if leaders articulate a strategic story clearly enough, reality will obey. We turned the strategist into a kind of corporate sorcerer, waving words like wands. Workshops became rituals of conviction. Vision statements became spells of intent. But there are no magic words in strategy. Without movement, belief becomes illusion.

This civilising impulse made strategy more comfortable but far less useful. The discipline that once thrived on tension was recast as an exercise in agreement. Strategy stopped asking what must change and started asking who must approve. The outcome was a system designed for harmony, not advantage.

Organisations began to equate stability with success. The strategist’s role shifted from confronting uncertainty to maintaining calm. The instinct for movement was replaced by the performance of control.

The Marketing Mirage

When movement died, marketing filled the void. It offered coherence through message where organisations could no longer generate it through action.

Strategy became a story told about the organisation rather than a pattern lived within it. Purpose replaced posture. Brand substituted for behaviour. We learned to sound strategic rather than be strategic.

But coherence built through words is fragile. It aligns perception, not practice. Marketing gave strategy the appearance of life while it calcified. We built dashboards, frameworks, and campaigns, each another layer of performance masking inertia.

This is how strategy became theatre: performance without manoeuvre, certainty without coherence, movement without consequence. We stopped shaping our environment and started managing impressions of control.

Internal Inertia: The Silent Enemy

Inside every large organisation lies a hidden gravity. Success breeds routines; routines harden into habits; habits turn into defences. The structures built to support performance begin to absorb it.

Internal inertia is not resistance to change; it is the comfort of motion that no longer matters. People stay busy, projects move, metrics rise, yet nothing shifts. The organisation mistakes activity for adaptation.

This is why strategy execution so often feels like running through treacle. Signals from the environment are dulled by hierarchy and filtered by performance dashboards. Decision cycles stretch to the point where relevance evaporates. Leaders talk about agility while their systems fight to stay the same.

True strategy requires friction. It needs dissonance to detect what no longer fits. When tension is removed, orientation collapses. The organisation moves, but only in circles.

Reclaiming Strategy as Movement

To recover strategy, we must return it to movement. Strategy is not prediction or control. It is the discipline of staying coherent while everything around you shifts.

That means shortening the distance between sensing and acting. It means treating learning as manoeuvre, not as reflection. It means designing organisations that absorb feedback and re-orient continuously.

The strategist’s role is not to write plans or polish visions. It is to maintain rhythm, to sense, shift, and shape the organisation’s relationship with reality.

The ancient strategos, Sun Tzu’s water, and Boyd’s OODA loop all remind us that the essence of strategy lies in movement, orientation, and awareness. Once that instinct is lost, no framework or plan can replace it.

We don’t need more strategy documents. We need strategists who can meet reality.