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Strategy can’t survive alone in the wild

‘The strategy’ is often spoken about as if it were a singular thing – a document, a plan, a neatly packaged deliverable. But strategy doesn’t emerge in isolation or from one source.

Emma Andrews
Emma Andrews

02 October 2025

5 minute read

Strategy only becomes possible when it draws on the work of many disciplines – customer insight, data, content, design, operations, technology, brand, and more. Without those inputs, you don’t have a strategy, you have ideas.

Why strategy is misunderstood

Part of the confusion comes from how we talk about strategy. It’s often described as if it’s a standalone activity, when in fact it only exists through choices and trade-offs.

Roger Martin, one of the most influential voices in modern strategy, argues that strategy is fundamentally about choice: what you will do, and just as importantly, what you will not. A so-called ‘comprehensive strategy’ that tries to include everything is not a strategy at all – it’s a wishlist.

Greg McKeown, in Essentialism, makes a similar point: focus is not about doing more things, it’s about doing the right things. The discipline of strategy is the discipline of exclusion – of sifting through competing inputs, weighing their value, and deciding what gets in and what is deliberately left out.

That’s why strategy can’t be built in a vacuum. It needs diverse perspectives and robust inputs – from data, from markets, from customers, from operations. Without them, you don’t have strategy, you have ideas.

The strategist’s role

If strategy can’t survive alone in the wild, then the strategist’s role is not to ‘own’ it, but to curate, coordinate, and translate the diverse inputs that make it possible. A good strategist is less a commander and more a guide.

I often think of the strategist through four archetypes:

1. The Generalist
The word ‘strategy’ comes from the Greek strategos, meaning ‘general’. But not general in the military sense of barking orders from a tent. To me, it’s about being general – someone who zooms out, sees the landscape, and helps the team move through it. Strategy requires a breadth of perspective, not just depth in one area.

2. The Observer
Strategists look from the outside in. Faith Popcorn, often called the world’s first futurist, built her career on ‘outside-in’ trend forecasting – spotting cultural undercurrents like Cocooning and Down-Aging long before they went mainstream. A strategist needs that same posture: not just listening to what’s said, but scanning the edges for signals of what might come next.

3. The Detective
Strategy is pattern recognition. Like detectives, strategists assemble fragments of evidence – data points, customer behaviour, competitor moves – and piece them together into a coherent picture. This is where ‘systems thinking’ comes in: recognising that each clue only makes sense in relation to the wider system.

4. The Navigator
Perhaps most importantly, the strategist is a navigator. They don’t claim to know the final destination. Instead, they chart a course through complexity, guiding teams by translating multiple perspectives into a direction that feels both possible and purposeful. Oscar Trimboli, who writes about the power of deep listening, reminds us that much of what shapes outcomes is unsaid. Navigating well means listening not just to voices, but to silences.

In this sense, strategy is less about invention and more about integration – weaving together what others see, hear, and know into a story that everyone can move forward with.

How strategy is made (not imagined)

If strategy is often misunderstood as a lofty vision, the reality is much more grounded: it’s made, not imagined. A good strategy isn’t a flash of inspiration; it’s the disciplined work of collecting inputs, weighing trade-offs, and assembling them into a coherent whole.

At Luminary, we stress-test that whole using our 7 Pillars to make sure nothing crucial is missed and the plan will actually travel:

  1. Strategy and vision: Do we have a clear organisational strategy and a digital plan that directly links to it?
  2. Customer centricity: Are we genuinely customer-first?
  3. Data: Do we collect the right data and use it to drive change?
  4. Digital integration: Are our tactics coherent across every touchpoint?
  5. Content: Is there a scalable content engine with governance?
  6. Resourcing: Are people, budgets and partners aligned to deliver?
  7. Martech stack: Does the stack fit our objectives and requirements?

Why the pillars matter together 

Leave one out and the result is distorted. A brilliant customer idea with no resourcing won’t launch. A shiny martech stack without data discipline becomes shelfware. A polished content strategy without integration gets lost between channels. As Roger Martin reminds us, strategy is as much about what you won’t do; the pillars give you the inputs, and the strategist’s job is to cut, focus and integrate them into a single, executable direction.

The power of integration

This idea – that no single perspective is enough on its own – shows up well beyond digital strategy. The most robust models we see in the world are built on integration.

Take Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index. It isn’t just a vague sentiment measure; it’s designed around four pillars, nine domains, and more than 30 indicators. The point is that wellbeing can’t be captured by GDP alone. It requires a constellation of measures to tell the real story.

Or consider the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. None of the 17 goals stands alone – poverty, health, education, climate, and equality are interdependent. A gain in one area without progress in others is unsustainable.

Even in product development, the lesson holds true. A design sprint only works when you bring engineers, designers, marketers, and users into the room together. If you only run it through one lens, you don’t get a viable solution.

The parallel is clear: whether you’re measuring national happiness, advancing global sustainability, or creating a new product, the models that last are multi-dimensional by design. Strategy is no different.

Strategy as a platform, not a pedestal

Strategy is often mistaken for the prize – a polished artefact that sits on a shelf. But strategy doesn’t exist in isolation. It can’t.

Strategy is more like a platform: a place where perspectives, inputs, and choices come together. It’s the sum of customer insight, data, content, resources, technology, and brand expression, integrated into a narrative that others can act on.

That’s why the strategist’s work is never about making a single bold proclamation. It’s about weaving together what’s already there – the fragments from across the organisation, the signals from the outside world, the choices about what to pursue and what to leave behind – into a coherent direction.

To borrow Roger Martin’s language, strategy is about how you win. But the way you win is not by making ‘strategy’ itself the trophy. It’s by making the connections that others miss.

Let’s stop putting strategy on a pedestal. Let’s start treating it as the platform that transforms scattered inputs into a plan you can execute.


Image: Macrovector/Freepik

Emma Andrews
Emma Andrews

02 October 2025

5 minute read

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