TLDR: The organisations that pull ahead are the ones that make good calls quickly and unwind the wrong ones without drama, while their rivals keep polishing the planning calendar and mistaking motion for progress.
The planning calendar has become a comfort blanket
Most leadership teams I work with can tell me exactly when their next strategy offsite lands, how many pages the annual plan runs to, and which quarter the board reviews it. Fewer can tell me how long it takes their company to say yes to a new pricing model, kill a failing product, or reallocate a budget line once the facts change. That gap is the whole game. Strategy work has quietly become a scheduling ritual, and the ritual feels like control. It rarely is.
I have come to believe that the cadence of planning is one of the least differentiated things a company owns. Everyone runs an annual cycle, everyone holds quarterly reviews, and everyone produces a deck. What actually separates the leaders from the followers is decision velocity: the speed and quality with which an organisation commits, and the ease with which it reverses course when it is wrong. That is where advantage compounds, and it is where most companies are quietly bleeding.
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