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.
The claim is quietly radical: no framework, including his own, produces strategic capability. Frameworks structure the work; the judgement that makes the work good is built the way a palate is built, by repetition and reflection. Which means strategy capability is a property of people, not of documents, and companies that buy documents keep discovering this at the worst possible moments.
The four elements
Reflective practice. After each strategy effort, examine what worked, what did not, and why. The learning is in the reflection, not the doing; twenty years of unexamined strategy work is one year of experience twenty times. Protected stillness. Strategic insight requires unhurried thinking time, and a calendar with no white space produces no strategy, whatever the job title says. Repetition across contexts. Judgement compounds by seeing the same structures in different industries, which is the engine behind useful analogy and the reason experienced outsiders spot in an afternoon what insiders have stopped seeing. Getting psyched up. Martin is explicit that strategy work begins with genuine motivation: a problem worth caring about, stakes worth feeling. Bored strategy is bad strategy in incubation.
The uncomfortable implication
A strategy offsite cannot produce strategic capability, only a strategy document. The capability lives in leaders who practise, which is why logic-not-analysis must be exercised rather than admired, and why Martin is sceptical of every impostor produced by process: process generates artefacts, practice generates judgement, and the two are routinely confused because they look identical in a steering committee.
How this connects to OKRs
The craft view is why our engagements are built around cycles rather than deliverables. Retrospectives are the reflective-practice reps, run quarterly with the learning on the table. Coaching an OKR Lead through real cycles is how the connoisseurship gets built inside your organisation, capability, not documents, and it is the honest answer to why the human layer of our work exists at all: reading about judgement and having it are different things, and only one of them survives our departure.
One line to keep: Craft is built in graded quarters, not offsites; reading about judgement and having it are different things.
Our synthesis of Roger Martin’s published work, sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
Can a strategy offsite build strategic capability? +
It can produce a document, not the capability. Strategic judgement is a craft, built through reflective practice, so it lives in leaders who run real cycles. That is why our engagements are built around quarters and coaching, not deliverables.
Why is the human layer of your work needed at all? +
Because reading about judgement and having it are different things, and only one survives our departure. Coaching an OKR Lead through graded retrospectives builds the connoisseurship inside your organisation, capability rather than documents.
Reading about method is not the same as running it. We install this system and build the capability that stays.
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