Catch my drift

We ask this a lot. Lately, the pause before the answer has been getting longer.

It isn't an awkward pause. It's a thoughtful one. The people we ask run good organisations, full of capable people who worked hard all year. The plan was consultative. It was considered. The board approved it. Everyone meant it. And then the year happened, and urgent, unplanned and thoroughly unstrategic things kept turning up, week after week, until the plan was something people remembered fondly rather than used.

I know that pause from the inside.

In my executive years I watched capable people pour themselves into problems that mattered. We'd fix the supplier. Hit the deadline. Get the operational fire under control. Then the next one would arrive, and it mattered too.

That's what makes it hard. Urgent work is usually legitimate work.

The strange part is that the strategic work was never a mystery. Open the bonnet. Design the ways of working properly. Decide what matters and say so out loud. Fix the operating model so the fires stop lighting themselves. We all knew. We just kept borrowing attention from it, a few hours at a time, to deal with whatever had landed that morning. The work that would have made the next urgent thing less likely was always the work that could wait.

We have tidy names for this now. Tech debt. Design debt. Underneath them all is attention debt, and like any debt, it charges interest.

This is the problem Straforma was built to work on. It's also, I've come to think, the opportunity.

The plan rarely fails in the room. It fails on a busy Tuesday morning.

Strategic drift is attention debt at the scale of a whole organisation.

Nobody decides to abandon the strategy. Nobody has to. Drift lives in the gaps. Between agreeing what matters and choosing what gets attention this week. Between calling something a priority and giving it people, money and time. Between the decision made at the leadership table and the version that reaches the person who actually has to act on it.

No single choice looks like drift. Each one made sense at the time. Add them up and you have the strategy you actually have, as opposed to the one on slide three.

Say customer experience is the priority. The leadership team agreed. The board signed off. It's on slide three.

Now it's March, and everything in that panel has happened in the same fortnight.

This is where the real strategy begins.

Do people understand the priority well enough to make those calls without you? Do they know what must be protected and what can bend? Can they disagree in the open, weigh the trade-offs and commit together once the call is made?

Or does every hard choice find its way back to the CEO?

If that last one sounds familiar, it isn't because your people lack judgement. It's because they've never had somewhere safe to use it.

By doing it. Getting it a bit wrong. Having another go.

We believe strategy becomes real through choices, not documents. So we built a place to practise choosing.

The Arena is a facilitated simulation. A team makes strategic decisions with incomplete information while the ground moves under them. They decide what matters, where the money goes and what they're prepared to give up. Then they live with the consequences. Then they go again.

It's lively. There's disagreement, surprise and, reliably, a good deal of laughter. People lean in because there's something to do, something at stake and a decision that won't make itself.

It's also revealing. Which assumptions sailed through unchallenged? Whose information changed the decision, and whose never made it to the table? What happened when the clock ran down? Did the team hold to what mattered, or did the latest shiny thing take over?

Those moments are the point. Not because they catch anyone out. Because they're real, they're shared, and they're safe to talk about afterwards.

Clients run an Arena ahead of their strategy or planning day. The leadership team then walks in with something most planning days lack: a fresh, shared memory of how they actually decide, and a language for talking about it.

"We need to communicate better" becomes a sharper conversation about what information people needed, who had it, and why it never reached the decision.

"We need alignment" becomes an honest look at the different priorities people were quietly protecting without realising it.

The planning day builds on evidence from your own behaviour. Strengths to keep. Habits to question. Choices that need to be made clearer than they are.

It works the same in a business, a public agency or a member organisation, because the questions are the same. What are we here to achieve? What deserves our attention? How will we choose when everything feels important?

A plan tells your team where you're going. Practice is what gets them there when the road changes.

Straforma grew this month, and doubled its Rebecca count in the process. I'm delighted to welcome two people who bring serious judgement and a great deal of warmth to the work.