We Have a Strategy Problem

Strategy is often the scapegoat for problems leadership avoided.

Staff usually know this before anyone says it out loud.

They’ve lived through the retreat. Sat in the breakout groups. Helped translate big ideas into “next steps.” They’ve watched priorities multiply, then quietly compete with each other. They’ve seen decisions postponed, reframed, or sent back for “more discussion”, while the work itself kept moving anyway.

So when an organization announces it has a strategy problem, staff tend to hear something else:

We’re going to revisit the plan instead of naming what’s actually hard.

This post is the first in a quarterly series exploring the problems organizations bring us, and what’s often really going on underneath them. These aren’t theoretical issues. They’re patterns we see again and again in organizations that care deeply about their mission and are genuinely trying to do good work.

Over the years, we’ve heard variations of this story from staff in different organizations. It often sounds something like this:

A program manager says, “The retreat was actually good. People were engaged. The conversations felt honest. I left thinking, maybe this time will be different.”

Three months later, she was still trying to reconcile competing priorities that had never been resolved. One initiative had been “endorsed,” another had been “supported,” and a third was “important but aspirational.” No one had clearly said which came first, or what could stop.

“Every decision felt like it was mine to make,” she said. “Until it wasn’t.”

When direction shifted, it was subtle. A comment in a meeting. A follow-up email reframing the goal. A new sense of urgency around something that hadn’t been named as a priority before.

“Nothing changed on paper,” she told us. “But everything changed in practice. And somehow, it always landed with staff to figure out how to make it work.”

By the time leadership concluded the organization had a strategy problem, she was already exhausted, not from the work itself, but from carrying decisions no one had fully owned.

The Pattern: When Strategy Becomes a Substitute

In healthy organizations, strategy does a few very practical things. It clarifies direction. It helps people make decisions without constantly checking “up the chain.” It creates shared language about what matters, and just as importantly, what doesn’t.

In struggling organizations, strategy often gets asked to do something else entirely.

It becomes a substitute for unfinished leadership work.

You can usually spot the pattern long before anyone names it explicitly:

• The organization has more than one strategic plan floating around. There’s the current one, the previous one, and the one everyone still references because “that was a good year.”

• Alignment is a frequent agenda item, but decisions rarely feel settled. Issues resurface in slightly different forms meeting after meeting.

• Staff are asked to move initiatives forward while priorities quietly shift underneath them.

• The plan itself may be thoughtful and well-written, but no one can clearly articulate which tradeoffs were intentionally made, or which were avoided.

What’s happening behind the scenes is rarely incompetence or bad faith. More often, it’s avoidance.

Avoidance of:

• Naming real disagreement at the leadership or board level

• Letting go of legacy programs that no longer fit

• Acknowledging capacity limits that feel uncomfortable or politically risky

• Making decisions that might disappoint someone influential

Rather than slowing down to work through those tensions, organizations move forward with a plan, hoping execution will resolve what leadership couldn’t (or wouldn’t) name.

In many organizations, there’s also no clear, ongoing forum for those tensions to surface between formal planning cycles. Flagged issues linger in meeting notes or hallway conversations, waiting for the next annual retreat or strategic refresh rather than being addressed in real time. Without a defined place for unfinished thinking and hard tradeoffs to be processed, strategy becomes the only container big enough to hold them.

The Cost: Staff Absorb the Friction

When leadership avoids hard conversations, the impact doesn’t disappear. It just moves.

Downward.

Staff become the buffer between ambiguity and reality. They translate vague direction into real work. They fill in gaps left by half-made decisions. They make judgment calls without authority, then recalibrate when priorities change, and pay the price for taking the ownership associated with trying to get things done.

This isn’t usually dramatic or visible from the outside. It’s quiet. Incremental. Normalized.

Over time, it shows up as:

• Chronic busyness with very little sense of progress

• Burnout disguised as commitment (“They’re just really dedicated.”)

• Cynicism about planning processes (“We’ll see how long this one lasts.”)

• Disengagement from high performers who stop raising concerns because it doesn’t change anything

This is also where organizations tend to misdiagnose the problem.

Leadership may see:

“Resistance to change”

“Low morale”

“A capacity issue”

Staff experience something very different:

We’re doing the work of deciding without being allowed to decide.

That gap matters.

It affects how long projects take, how much rework is required, and how safe people feel raising concerns early, when those concerns would actually help. Over time, talented people stop pushing for clarity. Some leave. Others stay, but disengage just enough to protect themselves.

Eventually, the organization hits another inflection point. Progress slows. Tension rises. And leadership reaches for a familiar solution:

“We need a new strategy.”

The cycle repeats.

The Insight: This Isn’t a Strategy Failure

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Most strategy failures aren’t failures of thinking. They’re failures of how different kinds of work are handled, and who ends up carrying them.

This is where the The 6 Types of Working Genius framework becomes useful, not as an assessment, but as a lens.

Working Genius identifies six distinct types of work that must happen for organizations to move effectively from idea to execution: wondering about what’s needed, inventing possible solutions, discerning what will actually work, galvanizing people around direction, enabling progress through support, and tenaciously pushing work to completion.

When one or more of these types of work is skipped, rushed, or overloaded onto the wrong people, strategy starts carrying weight it was never designed to bear.

In organizations stuck in repeated “strategy problems,” we often see the same pattern:

• Questions are rushed past in the name of efficiency

• Decisions are deferred to preserve harmony

• Commitment is implied but never fully generated

• Execution is expected to compensate for what wasn’t clarified upstream

When this happens, the work doesn’t disappear, it just gets redistributed. Staff absorb the wondering, the discernment, and the enabling work without the authority to do it well. Strategy becomes brittle because it’s being asked to solve an energy imbalance, not a planning gap.

That’s why new plans don’t stick.

That’s why frustration keeps resurfacing.

And that’s why staff burnout often shows up long before leadership recognizes a deeper issue.

Working Genius doesn’t replace strategy, but it does explain why strategy so often becomes the scapegoat.

A Better Starting Point

Before launching another planning process, retreat, or refresh, it’s worth pausing to ask a different set of questions:

• What kinds of work are we consistently rushing past or avoiding altogether?

• Where do conversations stop short of real decisions?

• Which roles are overloaded because clarity never fully landed upstream?

These questions are uncomfortable, but they’re also clarifying. Answering them honestly often unlocks progress far more effectively than rewriting priorities yet again.

To support that kind of reflection, we’ve developed a short organizational diagnostic designed to surface where work is breaking down, and who is absorbing the cost.

It takes just a few minutes to complete and doesn’t require familiarity with any frameworks or assessments. The goal isn’t to label people or prescribe solutions. It’s to recognize patterns that strategy alone can’t fix.

If you’re wondering whether your organization really has a strategy problem, or something else entirely, this is a useful place to start.

A Clear Next Step

If this post feels uncomfortably familiar, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone.

A brief conversation can help you determine whether:

• You truly need a new strategic plan, or

• You need clearer decisions, better role alignment, or different conversations at the top

If you’d like to explore that, we invite you to reach out to CSR for an initial conversation. No pitch. No prep work required. Just a chance to name what’s actually hard, and see what might help.

Looking Ahead

In the next post in this series, we’ll explore what’s really happening when organizations say, “We can’t seem to make decisions,” and why more discussion isn’t always the answer.

About the Author

Patrick Larkin is a seasoned Nonprofit Consultant with over 25 years of leadership experience across various institutions. With a foundation in public horticulture and museum management, he has served on the board of the American Public Gardens Association and as a Peer Reviewer for the American Alliance of Museums. Patrick honed his skills in fundraising, board development, and strategic planning, continually focusing on aligning organizational missions with public needs.

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