Perfection is in the eye of the beholder

After 6 weeks of posting about maturity I wanted to take a break and talk about something else, There is more to explore on maturity, Including the implications for measurement, and of leadership amongst other things. In the meantime I hope you enjoy this post on Perfection in strategy.

Have you ever spent a day hiking, biking, rock climbing, or surfing, then put up your tent for the night and sat down—preferably beside a campfire—to eat a meal prepared in a hurry with very little care?
I have been lucky enough to do that more than a handful of times. Hand on heart, some of those meals have been perfect.

Have you ever sat in a quiet restaurant with someone you care about, on a day when the wait staff clearly love their work and the room feels full of people enjoying good food and good company? I have been lucky enough to experience that too. Hand on heart, some of those meals have been perfect.

Or perhaps you have sat down to a meal prepared by someone who expresses joy and care through making food—on a day when they are simply overflowing with both. I am lucky enough to have people like that in my life. Hand on heart, those meals have been perfect too.

The point is not that these meals were perfect in the same way. Perfection changes with context, community, timing, and experience.

That idea matters deeply to me in strategy work. The ability to recognise that “good” shifts. That what good looks like, and what good is, changes with the conditions around us. This idea has been central to how I think about designing pragmatic, dynamic, and adaptable strategies, that you can start to implement as they are being developed.

Perfection gets in the way of good

To see why, let us explore a different idea of perfect. If we stop thinking of perfection as a quality of special moments and instead treat it as something to achieve, something fixed and measurable, we can run into problems.

Strategy is particularly vulnerable to this. Because strategy matters, it is often tarred with the brush of perfectionism. Every scenario should be planned. Every SWOT analysis should be completed. Every PESTEL should be… PESTELed? You get the point.

The work of strategy design, the thinking about where we are going, why we are going there, and who we are going with, can become co-opted by the desire to turn strategy into a highly refined, heavily reviewed, long-winded think piece. It can become a document that implies there is only one possible future: the future described in this strategy. The perfect strategy.

The problem is not planning. The problem is believing that enough planning can remove uncertainty.

In refining, reviewing, and expanding a strategy in the hope of making it good enough for governance to sign its name to it, two sneaky assumptions can work their way in:

• This strategy can predict the future.

• This strategy can control the future.

When we work towards a singular version of perfection, strategic design moves away from the question, “What could the future look like?” and towards, “What must the future look like?” In creating that rigidity, we shrink the pathways through which strategy can be successfully implemented. A world of possibilities is narrowed to one: the world in which everything goes exactly to plan.

Good is better than perfect

In the unlikely event that everything does go well for that one strategy, you may avoid the risks you planned to avoid, as well as the unforeseen problems that could have disrupted you. But you may also avoid the opportunities that emerged along the way—opportunities that could have led to something better than the original “perfect strategy”.

This is why I champion adaptive strategy. Yes, it adds resilience when times get tough. But it also creates space to pursue opportunities when times are good.

An adaptive strategy holds purpose, direction, and strategic intent tightly. It holds the exact route, sequencing, and specific interventions loosely enough to respond to what is learned.

Adaptation: the other strategic skill

A highly refined strategy document can be evidence of one strategic capability becoming out of balance: prediction. Being able to make viable predictions about what might happen next has always been an important part of the strategy toolkit. It still is.

But as the future becomes less knowable and less controllable, organisations also need to build their capability to adapt.

In the past, success may have depended on shaping a market or spotting the next major trend early. Those capabilities still matter. But the ability to intentionally recast what comes next—when operating conditions shift, new opportunities emerge, or assumptions prove wrong—is increasingly a competitive advantage in its own right.

Strategy, then, comes down to a balance between two organisational skills:

• The ability to anticipate what may happen next.

• The ability to adapt to what is happening now.

Maturity pathways create options

This is where a maturity approach becomes useful.

When an organisation uses maturity to understand its systems, it shifts from merely having a strategy to becoming more strategic. Instead of committing to one fixed route from today’s reality to a desired future, the organisation can see a number of possible maturity pathways.

Strategy still provides direction. It tells us what matters, what we are trying to achieve, who we are doing this all for, and the boundaries within which we will act. But it does not pretend to know every step of the journey in advance.

Each system has a current maturity level and a number of possible next moves. Some systems may need to become more repeatable. Others may need to become shared across teams. Others may need better information, clearer ownership, or space to learn and improve.

Organisations also have a limit to how much change they can absorb at any one time. A strategy that attempts to change every system at once is not necessarily ambitious; it may simply be undeliverable.

A maturity approach makes this visible, and makes actions intentional. It helps an organisation choose a realistic first tranche of change: the systems that need attention now, the level of maturity they need to reach, and the capability, trust, time, leadership, and resources required to get there. That first tranche of work is then delivered into a changed context. The organisation learns from what happened. Its systems mature, people develop new capability, and the environment may have shifted again.

The next question is not, “Are we still following the original plan?” It is, “Given what we now know, what does this strategy mean for us now?”

That is adaptive strategy. It is not abandoning direction. It is intentionally adjusting the next piece of work so that the organisation keeps moving towards its purpose.

Rightsizing ambiguity

Change is increasingly normal in our working environments. Climate, economic, political, technological, and social conditions can all change the expectations placed on organisations, often more quickly than our planning cycles would like.

In uncertain conditions, people understandably seek stability. Everyone has a different tolerance for the discomfort caused by ambiguity, yet working with some ambiguity is now part of most modern roles.

There is an argument that a strategy with more choices, an adaptive strategy, simply heaps more ambiguity on staff in an already ambiguous world. I have heard a version of this from senior leaders: “My people would not be able to handle that. We just need to give them one option.” I understand the instinct. People want clarity. But giving people a single option when the organisation does not actually possess certainty is not clarity. It is false certainty. It’s a lie. and as much as people want certainty, to trust you they need you not to lie.

The alternative is not to leave people adrift in endless possibilities. It is to rightsize ambiguity.

Leaders can be clear about purpose, direction, priorities, boundaries, decision rights, and the next piece of work. They can also be honest about what is unknown, where ambiguity remains, and how the organisation will make sense of it together.

The real conversation is:

“There is ambiguity here. It sits in these places. We do not yet have every answer. But we know what matters, we know what we will do next, and we will work through what emerges.”

This requires faith in people. It assumes that staff do not need leaders to pretend certainty exists; they need leaders who can provide meaningful direction, make decisions when the evidence is sufficient, and create a trustworthy environment for learning and adjustment.

Good enough for now

Strategy for our modern changing world is a balance between two organisational skills: the ability to predict the future and the ability to adapt to what is happening now. A good strategy does not attempt to be perfect. It is clear enough to guide action, practical enough to deliver, and open enough to learn.

So perhaps the more useful strategic question is not, “Is this strategy perfect?”

It is:

What is good enough for now—and what will help us recognise when it is time to adapt?

NB- I recognise that important stakeholders will still demand the “Perfect Strategy” in a lot of cases, in those cases a nicely polished document is perfect for getting them to focus on the next challange.