Pop quiz: Can your sales team recite your core strategy? Can your product team? If you asked three different people, would you get three different answers?
You spent weeks crafting your strategy document. Multiple stakeholders. Endless revisions. Finally, you had something everyone agreed on. Then you filed it away in a shared drive and wondered why nothing changed.
Here's what actually happened to that strategy document.
The Telephone Game
A sales person needs to create a deck for a prospect. They remember the general gist of the strategy, so they write their own version. It's close enough.
Marketing sees the deck. They like some of the language, so they adapt it for a campaign. They tweak a few things to make it punchier.
Product is building the roadmap. They remember the strategy meeting from six months ago. They build based on what they recall.
Meanwhile, the actual strategy document? Still sitting in that folder. Untouched. Unopened.
Six months later, your sales messaging doesn't match your marketing positioning. Your product roadmap is solving problems that aren't actually strategic priorities. And when you ask your team what the strategy is, you get three different answers.
This isn't a failure of memory. It's a failure of systems.
Strategy Isn't a Document. It's a System.
The problem with putting strategy in a document is that it turns strategy into a moment in time instead of a living guide.
Strategy isn't something you do once and shelve. It's something that should inform every decision, every deliverable, every conversation with a customer. It should be easy to access, impossible to ignore, and constantly evolving as you learn new information.
But when your strategy lives in a document:
Your strategy becomes a historical artifact instead of an operational tool.
What Should You Do Instead?
Strategy needs to be operationalized, not documented.
That means making it visible, accessible, and embedded in your daily work. It means creating mechanisms for people to reference it when they're building decks, writing copy, or making product decisions. It means updating it when you learn something new about your market, your customers, or your competition.
And it means accepting that strategy isn't a one-and-done deliverable. It's a living, breathing thing that guides your company, but only if you treat it that way.
So ask yourself: Is your strategy guiding your work? Or is it gathering dust in a document somewhere, slowly becoming irrelevant while everyone plays telephone with what they think the strategy is?
