Your plan is lying to you (and you already know it)
Most leadership teams will tell you they have a strategy. If you ask them what it is, they'll show you a plan.
There will be initiatives, timelines, maybe even a roadmap. Everything will look sensible and reassuring. Stakeholders will nod. Meetings will end on time.
And yet, six months later, very little will have actually changed.
This isn't because people are incompetent. It's because what gets called "strategy" is actually a well-formatted lie that everyone has agreed not to question. The plan says you're making progress. The plan says you're aligned. The plan says you know where you're going.
Your plan is lying to you.
When distribution becomes a hostage situation
Years ago, I watched a mid-sized FMCG company with a genuinely innovative product make a decision that looked like ambition but was actually avoidance.
The product was ahead of its time. Premium positioning, strong margins, beloved by specialist retailers who had built their reputation on carrying brands that mattered. It was doing well. Not explosively, but profitably and sustainably.
Then someone decided it should be "for everyone."
Which meant it needed to be everywhere. Specialist retailers, supermarkets, small shops, online marketplaces, even pharmacies.
On paper, this looked like growth strategy. In reality, it was the absence of a choice disguised as a plan.
The company wasn't a global giant with unlimited resources. It didn't have the sales force or the financial muscle to properly support that kind of distribution footprint. But the plan said "expand," so expand they did.
What actually happened was predictable, brutal, and entirely avoidable.
The specialist retailers (the ones who had championed the brand from the beginning) found out their hero product was now sitting on supermarket shelves. One morning it was exclusive. The next, it was everywhere.
In many cases, even the regional sales agents didn't know it was happening.
Did they throw us out? No. But they stopped pushing. Why would they? The supermarket down the street now carried the same product, often at a lower price. The exclusivity that made them feel special vanished overnight.
Then the pricing war began.
One massive online player (you know which one) started running permanent 5+1 promotions on the flagship product. The one that generated 65% of revenue.
For specialist retailers, a 5+1 was an event. Something special they'd run twice a year to drive traffic. Now it was permanent online. The promotion became the baseline price.
They called us. Not to ask for the same terms: that would clearly have made no commercial sense. They wanted us to make it stop.
We couldn't.
Anti-cartel regulations meant we couldn't dictate pricing to retailers. And even if we could, this player was too big. They knew it. We knew it. The specialist retailers knew it.
Meanwhile, supermarkets saw the online promotions, matched them in their weekly flyers, and demanded better terms from us to protect their margins. The online player saw the supermarket flyers and threatened to go even more aggressive.
Private label started creeping in.
It was a hostage situation. Except nobody had a strategy, so nobody knew who was negotiating, what the terms were, or when to walk away.
I was there. First as part of the marketing team when this rolled out in the home market. Later, as a country manager in other regions where I fought to prevent the same situation from repeating.
And in some markets, I won.
We didn't roll out the same strategy. When expansion happened, it happened with a different product assortment, one that didn't cannibalise the hero products that the specialist channel depended on.
It wasn't perfect. But it was a choice. An explicit trade-off. And it avoided the worst of the damage.
But not everywhere.
In one northern European market, entering supermarkets cost us our historic distributor relationship and locked us out of the specialist channel for years. Revenue dropped over 60% year-on-year. I arrived after the decision had been made, tasked with accelerating supermarket rotations to compensate for the specialist channel we'd just torched.
It took four years to recover the rotations.
Four years of relentless work, constant firefighting, and margin erosion. We got the volumes back, eventually. But at a fraction of the profitability we'd had with the original distributor. And the specialist channel? Still locked. It stayed closed for another six or seven years after that.
So yes, we "recovered." But at what cost?
This is what happens when the plan says "expand" but the strategy never asked "expand into what, at the expense of what, and why?"
The difference that actually matters
Here's the thing about plans: they answer "what are we going to do next?"
Strategy answers a harder question: "why this, and not something else?"
Plans organise actions. Strategy organises choices.
Plans assume the world is reasonably stable and that execution is the main variable. Strategy exists precisely because the world is complex, unpredictable, and full of trade-offs you'd rather not make.
Good strategy starts with diagnosis, not wishful thinking. It's fed by what customers actually do, not what they say in focus groups. It forces you to name priorities, but also exclusions. It makes trade-offs explicit before the market makes them for you.
A plan can exist without choices. It can be a beautiful, well-structured document full of initiatives that all seem important.
A strategy cannot.
Strategy requires you to say no. To abandon channels. To disappoint stakeholders. To accept that you can't be everything to everyone, and that trying will destroy you faster than doing nothing.
Most leadership teams know this, intellectually. But when it's time to actually choose, to actually exclude, the plan becomes a very convenient shelter.
Because plans don't force confrontation. They allow progress without disagreement, alignment without clarity, and movement without direction.
For a while, this works.
Until it doesn't.
How to know if you have a plan pretending to be a strategy
If you suspect your strategy is actually just a plan in disguise, here's how to find out. Do this exercise with your leadership team. It takes one hour. The discomfort you'll feel is proportional to how badly you need it.
- Start with diagnosis, not aspiration
Write down, in one sentence: what problem are your customers trying to solve when they choose you? If your answer starts with "we want to be" instead of "our customers need to," stop. You're describing your aspiration, not their reality. A strategy built on what you want to be true will collide with what actually is true. The market wins that collision every time. - Name what you're excluding
For every priority in your plan, write down what you're explicitly NOT doing. "We're expanding into retail" needs to become "We're expanding into retail, which means we will not pursue DTC for the next 18 months, even if a competitor does." If you can't write the exclusion, you don't have a strategic choice. You have a wish that sounds busy. - Test it with trade-offs
Take the three most recent decisions that required CEO approval. Now ask: if your strategy were truly clear and shared, would these decisions have been obvious to your team without escalation? If the answer is no, your strategy lives in your head. It's not usable by the people who need to make daily choices. Which means they're either guessing or waiting for you. Either way, you're the bottleneck. - Make it repeatable
Pull three people from your team. Not leadership. People who execute. Describe a realistic scenario: "A new customer in Germany wants exclusivity, but it conflicts with our existing Austrian distributor. What do we do?" If they give you different answers, or look confused, your strategy isn't shared. It's a document they've seen once in a presentation. A real strategy is a shared language for making decisions. If it requires you to translate every time, it's not working. - Feed it with reality, not hope
Every quarter, look back at one significant decision you made. Ask: was this based on what the data showed, or what we hoped would be true? If you can't find examples of data contradicting your assumptions, you're not looking hard enough. Or worse, you're not collecting the data that would challenge you. Markets don't care about your narrative. Customers don't behave the way focus groups said they would. Competitors don't follow the script. Your strategy needs to live in that reality, not in the version you present to investors.
The lie you're probably telling yourself
Here's the truth most leadership teams don't want to admit: a plan is emotionally easier than a strategy.
A plan lets you avoid confrontation. It lets you keep all stakeholders happy, at least for now. It lets you delay the hard decisions until "we have more data."
A strategy forces you to choose. To exclude. To disappoint people. To accept that you can't have it all.
And if you're the founder, or the CEO, that feels like failure. It feels like you're giving up on opportunities, abandoning growth, playing small.
So instead, you create a plan that says yes to everything. You call it strategy. You present it confidently. Everyone nods.
And your plan starts lying to you.
It tells you you're aligned. You're not. You've just agreed to avoid the difficult conversation.
It tells you you're growing. You're not. You're spreading resources too thin to make an impact anywhere.
It tells you you're making progress. You're not. You're moving fast in no particular direction.
The market will eventually tell you the truth. But by then, you'll have burned relationships, wasted capital, and exhausted your team on initiatives that were doomed from the start.
Strategy is not a document
Strategy doesn't need to be loud or sophisticated.
It needs to be shareable. Not as a slide deck or a slogan, but as a common language that allows people to disagree, contribute, and understand what really matters.
It needs to be choiceful. Not a list of priorities, but a set of explicit trade-offs that clarify what you're willing to sacrifice.
It needs to be fed by reality. Not by what you wish were true, but by what customers actually do, what competitors are actually capable of, and what your organisation can actually execute.
When that's missing, when strategy is implicit or fragmented, plans take over. Meetings multiply. Activity intensifies. And nothing changes.
If you're reading this and something feels familiar, you already know what the problem is.
Your plan is lying to you.
The question is whether you're ready to stop believing it.
If you are, start here: write down the three hardest trade-offs you're avoiding. The channels you won't enter. The customers you won't serve. The opportunities you'll abandon.
If you can't write them, you don't have a strategy. You have a wish list.
And the market is about to choose for you.
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