Posted by Anders Toxboe on August 04, 2026 · 14 mins read

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Strategy Has a Restart Problem

Why organizations keep rebuilding direction instead of keeping strategic understanding alive.

Most organizations do not suffer from a lack of strategy. They suffer from the fact that strategy keeps having to be restarted.

Every quarter, leaders gather to review what has changed, revisit priorities and decide what matters next. New slides are created, new frameworks are introduced and new language appears. Teams are asked to realign. Initiatives are renamed, goals are rewritten and roadmaps are reshuffled. The process can feel disciplined and intentional, but there is an uncomfortable question underneath it: if strategy was understood last quarter, why does everyone need to reconstruct it again this quarter?

I have been part of this pattern more than once, and for a long time I assumed the problem was communication. I thought that if I could just find a better way to frame the direction, alignment would follow. Over time, I came to think the problem was much deeper. We were not struggling because we lacked a good strategy framework. We were struggling because strategic understanding was not staying alive between strategy conversations.

When the framework keeps changing, the problem may not be the framework

At one point in my career, I was leading several product teams and struggling to align with top management on direction. It often felt as if we were speaking different languages. We could discuss the same opportunities, the same constraints and the same future, but still walk away with very different interpretations of what mattered most.

So every quarter, I tried something new.

One quarter, I framed our strategic roadmap as a radar. Another quarter, it became now, next and later. Then we tried three horizons. At another point, we used OKRs. Each framework seemed promising because each gave us a new way to structure the conversation, and every time I hoped this would finally be the representation that made the direction obvious enough for everyone to align around it.

After a few quarters, one of the product managers asked me jokingly what framework we were going to use next quarter.

The joke landed because it exposed something I had not yet admitted to myself. We were restarting the strategy conversation every quarter. The language changed, the visualization changed and the framework changed, but the underlying disagreement remained. We eventually tried using Stephen Bungay’s alignment gaps to make the disconnect more explicit, but even that did not solve the core problem. The issue was not that we had chosen the wrong framework. The issue was that we had never built enough shared understanding of the direction for any framework to carry it.

Frameworks can organize a conversation, but they cannot substitute for one.

Strategy can look aligned without being understood

This is one of the dangers of strategy work. It is possible to create the appearance of alignment without creating the conditions for it.

A roadmap can look coherent. An OKR can sound precise. A strategy deck can present a compelling narrative. People can nod in the room and still leave with different mental models of what the organization is trying to achieve, what trade-offs are acceptable and what should happen when reality does not match the plan.

This is quite important for the argument: strategy only becomes useful when people have to make decisions without the original strategy conversation happening again.

If every unexpected situation needs to be escalated back to leadership, then the strategy has not really traveled through the organization. If every planning cycle begins with a fresh explanation of what matters, then strategic understanding has not been maintained. If people can repeat the objectives but cannot use them to make trade-offs, then the organization may have communicated strategy without actually creating shared direction.

The real test of strategy is not whether people can describe it. It is whether they can use it.

I saw the same restart problem at a much larger scale

At another organization, this time in the media industry, I was responsible for ten Scrum teams. We used PI Planning and brought everyone together every quarter for a large, hands-on planning event. On paper, it was designed to create alignment across teams and make dependencies visible. In practice, something stranger often happened.

We seemed to forget what we had agreed on the quarter before.

Priorities re-emerged as if they were new. Direction shifted depending on who was most persuasive in the room, who had the strongest organizational position or who controlled the budget. Some initiatives would suddenly become urgent, while others would stretch across years without ever really being finished because they had become too large or too politically difficult to stop.

The organization was a non-profit, which made the situation particularly interesting. There was no simple profit or revenue signal that could resolve disagreements. Journalism and content carried enormous weight, which was appropriate, but that also meant many strategic decisions were based on competing interpretations of the mission. The mission was important, but broad enough that different groups could use it to justify very different priorities.

Every quarter, the organization came together to decide direction again.

We called it planning, but much of what was happening was actually strategic reconstruction.

The meeting was not simply translating an existing strategy into coordinated action. It was renegotiating what the strategy meant.

Strategy has the same flow problem as delivery

This is where the pattern connects to something I have been thinking about more broadly.

In product development, teams often lose flow because they repeatedly have to rebuild shared understanding before work can continue. A cycle ends, a new one begins and suddenly the team has to reconstruct context around the customer problem, the technical constraints and the intended outcome before delivery can restart.

Strategy suffers from the same problem.

The organization pauses, gathers everyone together, reconstructs the context and then creates a new expression of direction. A quarter passes, reality changes, shared understanding fades and the process repeats.

The problem is not the quarterly meeting itself. The problem is that too much strategic understanding has been allowed to disappear between meetings.

That makes strategy episodic.

Reality is not episodic.

Customer behavior does not wait for quarterly planning. Competitors do not wait. Technology does not wait. Teams learn things every day that should change how the organization interprets its opportunities and constraints. When those signals are not continuously integrated into the strategic conversation, they accumulate until the next planning event, where everyone tries to make sense of them at once.

That is a restart.

Strategy should stay alive in the work

I increasingly think strategy should behave less like a document that is periodically refreshed and more like a shared model of reality that is continuously updated.

That does not mean constantly changing direction. In fact, it should make direction more stable.

If people are continuously exposed to the reasoning behind the strategy, then new information can be interpreted against an existing context instead of forcing everyone to begin again. A customer signal becomes a small adjustment to a shared model. A technical discovery changes one assumption. A shift in the market makes one opportunity more important and another less important.

The strategy evolves because the understanding evolves.

This is very different from waiting until the end of the quarter and asking everyone to reconstruct the whole picture.

It also changes how leaders communicate direction. Instead of waiting until the strategy is complete enough to present, leaders can share the tensions they are seeing, the opportunities they are becoming more convinced by and the assumptions that remain uncertain. Teams do not need a final answer to benefit from strategic context.

They need enough context to start interpreting what they see.

Direction can move ahead of commitment

This is perhaps the most important distinction.

Organizations often treat strategic communication as if it creates commitment. If leadership says an opportunity matters, people assume that means it has already become a roadmap item. If a strategic theme is discussed, teams expect resources to follow.

That makes leaders cautious about sharing direction before they are certain.

But understanding and commitment are not the same thing.

An organization can say, “We increasingly believe this customer segment will matter more to us,” without committing to a specific initiative. It can say, “We think this capability may become strategically important,” without deciding exactly how to build it. It can share emerging constraints without pretending to know the response.

That kind of early direction allows strategic understanding to accumulate without freezing the future too soon.

The organization gets time to think before it has to decide.

Implied strategy is always there

This is where I find Morten Elvang’s idea of implied strategy useful.

Even when an organization has not formally updated its strategy, its current actions, constraints and opportunities already imply one. People are allocating money, choosing what to stop, responding to customers and making trade-offs. Those decisions reveal what the organization currently believes matters, whether or not that belief has been captured in a strategy document.

The question, then, is not whether strategy exists between strategy cycles.

It does.

The question is whether the organization is consciously interpreting it.

A strategy process that only happens quarterly risks allowing the implied strategy to drift away from the stated strategy. Teams respond to reality while the official direction remains frozen. Eventually the gap becomes too large to ignore, and the organization gathers everyone together to reconcile the two.

Once again, we restart.

A more adaptive organization would keep that reconciliation happening continuously.

The goal is not more strategy meetings

It would be easy to misunderstand this argument as a call for more communication, more alignment sessions or more frequent strategy updates.

I think that would recreate the same problem at a higher frequency.

The goal is not to increase the number of strategy events. The goal is to reduce how much strategic reconstruction needs to happen inside them.

That means keeping direction close to the work. It means making strategic tensions visible before they become decisions. It means allowing teams to understand why priorities are shifting while those shifts are still emerging. It means treating strategy as something people use to interpret reality, not something they receive after reality has already changed.

When that happens, a quarterly strategy conversation can become much lighter. It no longer needs to rebuild the entire context. It can focus on what has actually changed.

A strategy that survives between meetings

The most useful strategy is not the one with the best framework.

It is the one that continues influencing decisions after the framework has disappeared from the screen.

Looking back at the years when I kept changing the representation of strategy every quarter, I was trying to solve an alignment problem through packaging. At the media organization, we tried to solve a direction problem through a large planning event. In both cases, the organization kept returning to the same place because the strategic understanding itself had not become durable enough to survive between cycles.

That is the restart problem.

The answer is not to find the perfect framework or hold the perfect planning event. It is to keep strategic understanding alive while the work is happening, so that every new piece of information adds to an existing conversation instead of forcing the organization to reconstruct the conversation from scratch.

Continuous flow is not only a delivery problem.

Strategy needs flow too.