Strategic Decision Making for Leaders Uses the Same Method

I have sat through strategy sessions with a 90-page plan and ten-year numbers carried to one decimal place. By late afternoon the room could recite the upside case and the downside case. Nobody had written down the one assumption the whole exercise needed to survive. That is what passes for strategic decision making for leaders in plenty of boardrooms.

Strategic decision making for leaders is the same decision process applied over years instead of days, giving assumptions more time to go stale unnoticed. Sufficient certainty still means knowing enough to act while uncertainty remains. Strategy does not lift a leader above that test, it merely lengthens the time available for errors to compound.

People occasionally call this Grant Purdy being rude about strategy. Fair enough. I am rude about any trade that fattens itself on retreats and paper while somebody else carries the consequences. Consultants and deck merchants do very well from a strategy process that never writes down the one thing that has to stay true.

Why strategic decision making for leaders is the same method

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The New York Times did not improve because somebody discovered the sacred category called strategy. In its 2025 annual report, digital-only subscribers reached about 12.21 million by year end, and digital-only subscription revenue rose to $1.43 billion. What matters is that management kept revisiting a long decision as reader habits and advertising economics moved. If the live assumptions are shifting every quarter, the useful work happens between retreats.

That is why I have never been impressed by the annual strategy retreat being treated as a sacred event. A long decision does not become wise because everyone flew somewhere pleasant to agree a document. It stays wise only while the surrounding conditions remain roughly what you thought they were. The moment those conditions move, the strategy deck is yesterday's weather report. Leaders who forget that end up defending the ceremony instead of the judgement.

Roger Estall and I used postal services in Deciding for the same reason. Letter volumes fell as email spread, parcel demand rose with web retail, and the network either had to be repurposed or left to decay behind polite language. If you need a shelf of decision-making frameworks to notice that, the framework is feeding on the business. The useful work is simpler. A long decision only stays honest if somebody designs the monitoring before the offsite glow wears off.

Strategic decision making for leaders fails when assumptions stop getting checked

Canada Post shows the slower failure. Its 2024 annual report says the corporation lost nearly $1.3 billion from operations in the year and more than $4.5 billion since 2018. Parcel revenue fell 20.3 per cent in 2024. Letter volumes dropped from almost 5.5 billion in 2006 to 2 billion in 2024, even as the network served 3.3 million more addresses. That is an institution still spending as if the old postal world can be bullied into returning.

I have chaired enough reviews to know the script. The original reasoning is gone. New executives inherit the routines as though they were weather. The board orders another review because visible diligence is safer than reopening the old bet, and because a fresh paper can make paralysis look conscientious. That ritual is one road into executive decision fatigue. It is also how an organisation keeps carrying out a decision nobody can reconstruct properly. We call that a historical decision, though the plainer description is inherited drift.

Why strategy is mostly a monitoring problem

Orsted's 2025 annual report makes the point without self-pity. Offshore wind remained the direction, but financing conditions and permitting trouble moved underneath the portfolio hard enough to hurt returns. ROCE came in at 5.4 per cent. Sunrise Wind was only about 45 per cent complete when offshore work resumed, and the report still talked about cost pressure and uncertainty around delivery conditions in the United States. The strategic direction survived, but the price of carrying it changed.

Too many boards and executives enjoy the offsite more than the re-check. They push monitoring down the food chain as if it were clerical mop-up, then act surprised when a ten-year bet drifts. A cockpit call and an investment programme both use the same method. The second one simply gives interest rates and permitting delays far more time to make fools of people. Monitoring is not the paperwork that follows a strategy decision. It is part of the decision.

I want one more thing written beside the assumption: how fast the surrounding Context can turn on it. Some assumptions drift slowly. Others turn on you before the minutes are filed. Write down the event that kills the bet. If that sentence is missing, the strategy is only a hope with stationery.

Long-horizon strategy breaks when nobody reopens inherited truth

The Post Office Horizon Inquiry is uglier because people were ruined while the assumption sat there being obeyed. The inquiry's first volume, published on 8 July 2025, said Horizon data was treated as reliable despite known bugs, errors, and defects. Leaders and lawyers kept acting as if shortfalls must belong to subpostmasters. Nobody had the decency to re-examine the belief once careers and prosecutions were hanging off it. The assumption stopped being examined and started being obeyed.

It is a leadership failure in which software happened to be present. Leaders protected an inherited belief long after the evidence had turned, then hid inside procedure. That is why strategic decision making for leaders needs dated assumptions and a plain note of what should have killed the bet. Successors should be able to see what earlier executives were relying on, without needing a historian and a barrister. If you want the wider job around that, read the full guide to decision making for leaders. I have seen too many institutions dress this failure up as sophistication to admire it.

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Grant Purdy is the co-author, with Roger Estall, of Deciding (2020), and the architect of the Universal Decision-Making Method.