I have become a lot less impressed by strategy that only makes sense in a meeting.
Most plans sound pretty good when the people discussing them already understand the problem. Everyone knows the history, the goals, the exceptions, and what somebody probably meant by the vague part on slide twelve. It feels aligned because the people in the room are supplying half the context themselves.
Then the plan reaches the site.
Now it has to make sense to a manager trying to cover a call-off, an attendant with six cars waiting, or a customer who has no idea what the company is trying to accomplish this quarter. That is usually where the polished version of the strategy starts coming apart.
I used to think that was mostly an execution problem. Sometimes it is. But a lot of the time, the strategy simply was not finished.
Approving a pricing change is not the same as building a pricing strategy. The real work includes deciding how the value will be explained, what employees should say when someone pushes back, and whether the offer is simple enough to understand while a line is moving behind them.
The same is true for promotions, membership changes, new technology, or almost anything else we ask a site team to carry out. If the plan depends on employees remembering five exceptions, interpreting leadership’s intent, or constantly asking for clarification, the problem may not be the team. The plan may just be too complicated.
That does not mean every strategy should be watered down until it fits on a bumper sticker. The thinking can be complex. The experience at the site should not be.
Someone has to do the work of turning the big idea into clear decisions, useful tools, and language that sounds normal coming out of a real person’s mouth. That translation is not a task to hand off after the strategy meeting. It is part of the strategy.
This is also why the people closest to the operation should be involved earlier than they usually are. A site manager can often spot in five minutes what a leadership team missed in five meetings. They know where customers get confused, where the process slows down, and which parts will be ignored the second Saturday volume hits.
That feedback is not a lack of buy-in. It is the plan being tested against reality.
A strategy is not successful because everyone nodded in the meeting. It is successful when the people doing the work understand it, can explain it, and can make the right decision without calling someone who was in the room.
The site will eventually expose what the meeting did not. Better to build for that from the beginning.