Why Strategy Should Never Begin With Pre-Work: Lessons From Roger Martin’s “Strategy as Choices”
For anyone who has spent time inside a large corporation, the annual strategy cycle is painfully familiar: weeks of pre-work, decks prepared by every function, one-off “strategic inputs” from planning teams and consultants, and a leadership offsite that feels more like a compliance ritual than an exercise in strategic thinking.
Roger Martin, whose strategy as a set of choices framework has shaped some of the best strategy work in business, argues that this entire approach gets strategy backwards. After revisiting his article How to Prepare for Strategy, and comparing it with my own experience leading transformation and growth in financial services and fintech, I believe Martin’s critique deserves far more attention, especially among leadership teams who wonder why their strategy “process” rarely produces strategic clarity.
Below is my take on the core ideas and what they mean for executives, boards, and strategy advisors alike.
1. Strategy Begins With the Gap Between Intent and Outcome#
Martin makes a deceptively simple point: The only productive starting point for strategy is the mismatch between what leadership intended and what actually happened.
Not market trends. Not competitor analysis. Not long lists of initiatives.
Strategy begins with truth.
To put it plainly: What did we want? What did we choose? What happened? And why did those choices fail or succeed?
As a CEO, this resonates deeply. The most honest conversations I’ve had with boards or leadership teams always began with this gap because that gap exposes the causal logic behind past decisions. If you cannot explain why your previous choices produced the results they did, you have no foundation for choosing differently.
This is the real work. Everything else is noise.
2. Strategy Is a Leadership Function—Not a Committee Exercise#
Martin is unequivocal: Strategy cannot be delegated.
Not to Corporate Planning. Not to consultants. Not to the mid-management “strategy working group.”
Only the executive leadership team (ELT) can own strategy, because only they own the choices that allocate capital, talent, risk, and reputation.
This mirrors how I think about values inside a company. You cannot outsource the creation of values, because values are meaningless unless lived by leaders. Strategy is the same. If strategy is produced by staff, consultants, or analysts, you will get a plan, not a set of choices. And a plan—no matter how well formatted—does not guarantee commitment or coherence.
There is nothing more dangerous than a company whose staff-defined “strategy” contradicts the intent of the leaders who are accountable to shareholders.
3. The Hidden Danger of Pre-Work#
In most corporations, pre-work is seen as a way to “prepare” for strategy. Martin argues the opposite: pre-work—especially done without the ELT—creates bias and false certainty.
It is a way for someone else to set the agenda. It “loads the dice” with preferred data. It nudges leaders toward predetermined conclusions.
And in many cases, this pre-work becomes so elaborate that it replaces strategic thinking entirely.
I have seen this repeatedly: an internal strategy team or a consultant comes in with a heavy deck full of facts no one asked for, crafted to steer leadership toward a conclusion that was decided long before the offsite.
In this sense, pre-work is not preparation. It is contamination.
The only legitimate pre-work is answering the questions inside the heads of the ELT and the board—not what someone else thinks they should be thinking about.
4. Facts Matter. Decks Don’t#
Martin emphasizes that strategy teams should not be producing decks. Their job is to curate a concise fact base—and only the facts directly relevant to the choices leaders must grapple with.
This is not analysis for analysis’s sake. This is data with utility.
In my own advisory work, I always ask: Will this fact change a choice? If the answer is no, it’s noise.
The value of analysis lies not in volume, but in clarity.
5. Strategy Is a Thinking Process, Not a Planning Process#
Strategy is not a document. Strategy is a discipline of reasoning.
Roger Martin emphasizes that strategy must be a live, iterative exploration of possibilities and trade-offs, not a mechanical planning cycle. This aligns closely with the approach popularized by IDEO, whose human-centered design methodology treats strategy as an iterative process of reframing problems, generating hypotheses, and testing them in the real world. Their perspective on strategic planning (summarized in IDEO U’s article “Strategic Planning: How to Get Started”) reinforces that leaders must be in the room, actively shaping choices, not passively reviewing decks assembled by others.
Both Martin and IDEO converge on the same truth: Great strategy emerges from engaged, creative, participatory thinking—not from documents produced in advance of that thinking.
When leaders engage directly with ambiguity, pressure-test assumptions, and co-create choices, strategy becomes real. When they review a “strategy deck” created elsewhere, it becomes performative. This difference—participation versus observation—is often the difference between strategic clarity and strategic theatre.
Implications for Strategy Advisors (and Internal Strategy Teams)#
For advisors—whether internal or external—this redefines the job:
1. Advisor as Thinking Partner, Not Author of Strategy#
Your value is not writing a plan. Your value is provoking sharper thinking, structuring choices, and challenging assumptions.
2. Protect the Integrity of the Process#
Ensure all analysis is in service of the questions leaders themselves care about. Kill all pre-work that implicitly sets direction without shared ownership.
3. Anchor on the Choices That Matter#
Where to play. How to win. What capabilities and management systems must be built. These choices—and only these—define strategy.
4. Clarify Ownership Every Step of the Way#
Strategy belongs to the ELT. The board challenges and endorses. Advisors facilitate. No one else decides.
This is a quick win any advisor can bring to the table: eliminate agenda-driven pre-work and put ownership back where it belongs.
Why This Matters Now#
Companies today face infinite information, rapid change, and constant noise. Teams crave anchors: something stable and durable that guides decisions even as circumstances change.
Roger Martin’s framing makes strategy more like values: Timeless until the leadership chooses to change it.
Strategy cannot be allowed to drift with each planning cycle or each incoming deck. It must remain a coherent set of choices that guide the company until new choices explicitly replace them.
Conclusion: Start With the Truth, End With Shared Choices#
If I summarize Martin’s argument in one sentence, it is this:
Strategy starts with the truth about past choices, lives in the heads of accountable leaders, and succeeds only when those leaders make new choices that close the gap between aspiration and outcome.
I’ve seen the cost of doing it the wrong way: months of preparation, enormous decks, and a strategy no one believes in.
And I’ve seen the impact of doing it the right way: small rooms, honest conversations, and choices that actually change behaviour, investment, and outcomes.
The difference is not process. The difference is ownership.
Leadership owns strategy—or you don’t have one.