Part 2: When Strategy Breaks Before It Starts

Last time I wrote about how hesitation stalls companies.
This time, I want to talk about how broken strategies create the same stall—just slower.

Because it’s one thing to freeze before you act. It’s another to move forward with a plan that was never built to hold.

Dan Phillips

Chief Strategy Officer at OneVizion | Special Operations Veteran

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I’ve worked with some of the smartest people in the business. Brains aren’t the issue. Movement is.

Strategy is easy to talk about in a boardroom. It’s harder to translate into action. And when hesitation becomes the default, even great ideas stall out.

I’ve seen this happen across the board—from private equity-backed growth companies to legacy giants in regulated industries. Somewhere along the line, we started confusing caution with wisdom. We started thinking that waiting was the same as leading.

It isn’t.

Vision Gets the Spotlight. Discipline Does the Work.

You don’t get points for a good-looking roadmap if no one knows how to follow it.

A lot of companies confuse strategy with storytelling. The goals sound big. The decks look sharp. But when the rubber meets the road, they stall again—this time from friction, not fear.

Here’s the quiet truth:
Most strategies don’t fail in execution.
They fail in design.

If Ops Wasn’t in the Room, It’s Already Broken

You can’t build a real strategy without operational input.
I’ll say that again: You can’t.

If the people responsible for executing your plan weren’t in the room when you made it, don’t be surprised when it cracks under pressure.

Operators bring constraint. Structure. Visibility. And without that, you’re not making strategy—you’re making expensive assumptions.

What Real Strategy Looks Like

It’s not aspirational. It’s functional.

You know it’s real when:

  • Priorities hold up even when timelines shift
  • Teams know what not to do
  • Middle managers don’t need to “interpret” it
  • Execution doesn’t require a babysitter 

If people are confused about how to act, it’s not their clarity problem. It’s a leadership design problem.

Stress-Test Before Reality Does It for You

There’s no version of leadership where conditions stay stable.

So build for the turbulence:

  • What happens if you lose 20% of your capacity?
  • Who makes the call when something breaks?
  • What flex do you have when demand outpaces your systems?

If your strategy can’t answer those questions, it’s not ready.

Communication Is the Conversion Layer

The best strategy in the world dies in translation if you don’t invest in how it gets communicated.

That doesn’t mean a roadshow or an email blast.
 It means clarity—over and over again:

  • What it is
  • Why it matters
  • What it changes
  • Who owns what

If your front-line team can’t explain your strategy in a sentence, you don’t have alignment. You have a messaging gap.

Vision is important. But it’s not strategy.

Strategy is how you translate vision into action—across every level of the business.

So if your teams are spinning their wheels…
If execution feels heavier than it should…
If you’re constantly stepping back in to re-clarify…

Check the foundation.

The best strategies aren’t the most inspiring.
They’re the ones that hold up when things get hard.

And the ones people can actually follow.