Strategy as Craft
Martin's late-career theme: strategic expertise is connoisseurship, built like a craft, through repeated practice and deliberate reflection, not acquired from frameworks. Elements: - Reflective practice.
Elements:
- Reflective practice. After each strategy effort, examine what worked, what didn't, and why. The learning is in the reflection, not the doing.
- Protected stillness. Strategic insight requires unhurried thinking time; a calendar with no white space produces no strategy.
- Repetition across contexts. Judgment compounds by seeing the same structures in different industries, the engine behind analogy in Possibility Portraits.
- Getting psyched up. Martin is explicit that strategy work begins with genuine motivation, a problem worth caring about, stakes worth feeling.
Implication: a strategy offsite cannot produce strategic capability, only a strategy document. The capability lives in leaders who practise, which is why Strategy as Logic Not Analysis must be exercised, and why the craft view underpins his scepticism of Strategy Impostors produced by process.
Our synthesis of Roger Martin’s published work, sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
Reading about method is not the same as running it. We install this system and build the capability that stays.
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