Strategy decks are very good at the middle

Twenty years in newsrooms and boardrooms, and the shape of the thing never changes.

A reason it has to be now, and not next year. Someone at the middle of it who wants something badly enough. Something real in the way. And a moment – there’s always a moment – where the old way stops and everyone works out whether they’re coming.

Strategy decks are very good at the middle. They almost never have the beginning or the end. Which is why people can recite a roadmap perfectly and still not believe a word of it.

Here’s one example.

Lloyds was some years into a major technology transformation. A head of engineering needed the board to commit to one of three routes. Clever people, all of them. Not one an engineer. He needed someone to help him help them understand.

So we offered him a writer and an illustrator. It’s not a normal thing to offer a head of engineering. To his enormous credit, he said yes. Between them they drew the three options. No hundred-page appendix. Just three drawings.

The board chose one. It worked.

I never saw the drawings – I wasn’t cleared to see them. Which is rather the point. I didn’t make that decision, and neither did the writer or the illustrator.

We just made it possible to have the argument.

What changed wasn’t the argument. It was who could take part in it.

Three routes, drawn, meant a board of non-engineers could hold all three in their heads at once and compare them. You can’t do that with a hundred-page appendix. You can’t really do it with forty slides either – by the time you reach option three, option one has gone.

That’s the bit leaders tend to miss. When a decision stalls, the instinct is to ask for more detail. More analysis, another session, a deeper dive. Usually the problem isn’t that there’s too little information. It’s that the information is in a shape the room can’t use.

And it cost him something to ask. A writer and an illustrator is not what a head of engineering is supposed to want. It risks looking unserious in front of the people who sign off your budget. He did it anyway, because he’d rather be understood than look rigorous.

That’s what I’d take from it. Format isn’t a presentational afterthought. It’s part of the decision. And choosing the right one sometimes means being brave enough to turn up with drawings.