The Strategy Echo Chamber

What is at the heart of strategy?

Better decisions… better investments… better products… better execution… better planning… better forecasting. All of that makes sense. If you were creating a strategic vision or a three-year plan, you’d assume those things (and plenty more) would naturally be part of it. Strategy is always looking to translate into actual KPIs, results, and reviews. That’s certainly how I was taught to think about strategy… and, I suspect, many of us were. After my conversation with Marcus Buckingham (The Buckingham Institute and author of Design Love In, First, Break All the Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths and many more) on this week’s episode of Thinking With Mitch Joel, I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve been trapped inside a strategy echo chamber. Marcus approaches strategy from an entirely different direction… and it’s forcing me to rethink my own assumptions. Marcus no longer sees strategy as planning but as the intentional design of experiences that create feelings. I know that this sounds very fluffy… maybe too simple… but then I realized how rarely we actually think this way when we probably should.

Strategy in most organizations has become the act of designing processes… when it should be about designing experiences.

Does that land with you? Think about where leadership teams spend their time: Optimizing workflows… reducing friction… increasing efficiency… standardizing processes… measuring productivity. Now of course these things matter but all of them are in service of making the machine run better. Somewhere along the way, organizations stopped asking what may be the most beautiful strategic question of all: what does it actually feel like to work here… to buy from us… to interact with us and ultimately to trust us? We obsess over the mechanics while assuming the human experience will somehow take care of itself.

Maybe that’s why so much business feels increasingly transactional.

Customers feel it… employees feel it… eventually… brands feel it too. The more I sat with Marcus’ idea, the more I realized how often I confuse strategy with efficiency. Efficiency produces visible evidence that something improved. Meetings become shorter… software becomes faster… costs come down… productivity goes up. Those are meaningful improvements… but are they memorable ones? Will anyone tell a friend about them? Will an employee proudly describe them over dinner? Will a customer remember them six months later? Marcus is right in pointing out that experiences drive behavior and that behavior is what drives real outcomes. And if that’s true then maybe we’ve been thinking about strategy wrong in terms of what it means to our business.

That feels especially relevant right now.

We are being told that AI is (or is going to) optimize almost everything: from summarizing meetings to writing draft proposals to writing code to analyzing data and automating a myriad of tasks. Agents and chatbots have capabilities that are extraordinary but it seems like they also expose something very unique. If every organization has access to the same AI capabilities, then operational excellence starts becoming table stakes. Easier to achieve… and easier to copy. What is the harder thing to either replicate or create? It feels like the harder thing to create… and the hardest thing to copy… is how people feel after interacting with your brand.

That sounds much more like an experience than a workflow.

Which makes me wonder if leadership itself needs a different mandate. Maybe the job isn’t allocating capital, setting priorities and reviewing results. Maybe leadership is becoming the intentional design of conditions where employees flourish, customers return and brands become indispensable. What makes this hard is that these are moments most organizations barely notice because they don’t fit inside a spreadsheet.

Experiences don’t happen by accident… they have to be designed with intention.

So maybe strategy was never really about planning? Maybe planning is but one tool for creating the kinds of experiences that make people want to stay, contribute and come back. If that’s true… then perhaps the organizations that win over the next decade won’t be the ones with the smartest strategies on paper.

They’ll be the ones that understand strategy was never about making better plans… it was always about creating experiences that people choose to come back to.

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