Strategy Alignment
Everyone must be able to read, understand and, crucially, recall the strategy, its vision, priorities and success metrics, because aligned autonomous decisions depend on it. Comprehension is the precondition for autonomy.
Most organisations confuse communicating a strategy with landing one. The deck was presented, the town hall happened, the slide exists, and leadership assumes the job is done. But a strategy that people cannot reconstruct in their own heads is not guiding their decisions; it is sitting in a folder. The test is not whether people have seen the strategy. It is whether, unprompted on a Tuesday, they can say what it is and act on it.
Recall, not recognition
The bar we set is recall, not recognition. Recognition is nodding along when the strategy is on screen; recall is being able to explain it without the slide. Only recall supports autonomous decisions, because the moment a team needs the strategy is precisely the moment nobody is showing it to them, a trade-off in a meeting, a judgement call on scope, a choice between two good options. If the strategy lives only on a slide, those decisions default to instinct, politics or the loudest voice.
Why it makes aligned-not-cascaded possible
This principle is the engine under aligned, not cascaded. Teams that deeply understand the strategy do not need approval chains to set good OKRs, because they can check their own goals against a shared picture. Remove comprehension and you are forced back into cascading: if teams cannot be trusted to align themselves, someone has to align them, goal by goal, sign-off by sign-off. Comprehension is what lets you delete the bureaucracy safely. Every OKR narrative should therefore explain its connection to the strategy, both as a discipline for the writer and a check for the reader.
Martin’s recall standard
Roger Martin’s strategic narrative sets the same bar from the strategy side: people can only align autonomously with a strategy they can reconstruct, which means strategy must be written as an argument in prose, not a card of labels. "Customer-centric, innovative, operationally excellent" cannot be reconstructed because there is nothing to reconstruct, just adjectives. A real strategy, a chain of linked choices with reasons, can be retold, and a strategy that can be retold is one that travels to the front line intact.
What is being recalled
The thing to comprehend and recall is the Strategy Choice Cascade: five linked choices, held together as one argument, plus the Strategic Pillars that name the battlegrounds. Test it directly: ask someone two levels down to explain the strategy, and listen for the argument, not the slogan. The distance between their answer and the official one is the exact amount of alignment the leadership team is currently losing.
Ask five people from different teams, separately, "what is our strategy and why?" If you get five versions of the same argument, you have alignment. If you get five slogans or five different answers, you have a comprehension problem no cascade will fix, and the OKRs beneath it are aligned only by accident.
How do we know if the strategy is really understood? +
Ask people to explain it without the slide. If they can reconstruct the argument, comprehension is real. If they recite adjectives, it is not, and autonomous alignment will not hold.
Whose job is strategy comprehension? +
Leadership’s, to write it as a recallable argument; and every team’s, to be able to retell it. The OKR narrative is the mechanism that keeps both honest.
From the ZOKRI OKR Handbook, the methodology we install and maintain. Written by Matt Roberts.
A UK-based strategy and OKR consultant and two-time SaaS founder with a venture-backed exit, Matt turns strategy into execution for teams scaling from tens to thousands. He co-founded ZOKRI in 2018, having previously co-founded Linkdex, a venture-backed enterprise SaaS platform he led to a trade sale. He writes the methodology behind these notes.
A strategy nobody can recall is a strategy nobody is executing. We help you write it as an argument that travels, and coach teams until they can set aligned goals without asking permission.