Strategy creates clarity when it ends confusion—because unclear strategy breeds mixed messages, wasted effort, and “urgent” work that keeps hijacking the week. In this article, Jef Menguin shows how to turn strategy into a simple, repeatable message your leadership team can say the same way. Practice it and share it at work so decisions get cleaner, priorities stay stable, and execution stops drifting.
Imagine your next management meeting.
People bring reports, slide decks, and updates. The energy is serious. Everyone looks busy.
Before you begin, you ask one question:
“In your own words, how are we trying to win in the next three years?”
One manager talks about innovation. Another talks about cutting costs. Someone else talks about expansion.
Each answer sounds intelligent. But they don’t describe the same game.
This is not a discipline problem. This is a strategy and clarity problem.
Clarity doesn’t come from better slogans. Clarity comes from leaders doing real strategy work together—and making a few brave choices.
When Hard Work Doesn’t Mean Real Progress
Think of your organization as a boat.
People row hard. You approve projects. You launch initiatives. On the surface, there is motion.
But if one group rows toward “grow market share,” another rows toward “cut anything that moves,” and another protects old products “just in case,” the boat doesn’t move straight.
You pay for full effort, but you don’t get full progress. From the outside, the company looks active. From the inside, it feels like rowing in circles.
That’s what happens when you have activity without strategic clarity.
The Real Problem: Fog Inside, Not Just Pressure Outside
Leaders worry about competitors, the economy, and regulations.
But most days, the real enemy is the fog inside the organization—fog about:
- What “winning” really means
- Which customers and products matter most
- Which work still creates value and which work just fills time
- What leaders will finally stop doing
Fog creates hesitation. Fog keeps old projects alive long after they’ve lost their purpose. Fog makes meetings longer and decisions slower.
You see it when managers keep asking for “clarification” but never commit. You see it when teams quietly follow their own version of strategy because they never believed in the shared one.
You cannot remove fog by adding more words. You remove it by making sharper choices.
A Plan Is Not Enough
We’ve been trained to believe that if we create a good plan, clarity will follow.
So you run a planning session.
You book a venue. You do SWOT. You write vision and mission. You list goals, initiatives, owners, and deadlines. By the end, the walls are full and the mood is upbeat.
Then Monday comes.
Urgent requests appear. A big client complains. A regulator demands attention. Someone with influence pushes for a project that “we can’t ignore.”
The plan moves to a shared drive. People go back to how they always worked.
Here’s the core truth:
A plan describes what you intend to do. Strategy is about which ways of winning you choose. Clarity is when everyone understands and uses those choices.
You can have a detailed plan and still be unclear about how you’re actually trying to win.
Strategy Is Choosing the Few Moves That Multiply
You can list a hundred different ways to win:
- Be cheaper
- Be faster
- Be more innovative
- Enter new markets
- Go digital
- Add more products
- …and so on.
Most organizations try to keep too many of these alive. On paper, it looks ambitious. In practice, it spreads people thin.
Strategy is not about collecting 100 possible ways to win. Strategy is about discovering which few are:
- 10x or 100x more impactful than the rest
- Stronger when combined, because they multiply each other
- Able to produce the best results with less wasted effort
- Worth betting on, even if they haven’t been done before in your context
Real strategy work forces you to say:
“These three moves matter far more than the others.” “If we do these together, they reinforce each other.” “We will give them time, money, and attention—and we will let the others go.”
Sometimes strategy is also about courage.
It’s the courage to start something that hasn’t been done before in your industry or your organization. It’s the courage to stop something that everyone expects you to keep.
When you make those choices, clarity starts to show up.
Clearing the Cobwebs
Imagine your strategy as a room that has been used for years.
Every leader added furniture. Old posters are still on the walls. New boxes have been dropped in the corners. Over time, cobwebs formed—old ideas, half-truths, and unchallenged assumptions.
When your managers come together to examine your strategy honestly, they start removing those cobwebs.
They ask:
- Are we still trying to win an old game?
- Are there segments we serve only because we always have?
- Which products still deserve our best effort?
- Which beliefs about our “identity” are actually holding us back?
Each serious question clears a little more of the room. The space feels more open. You can see what’s actually there.
Clarity doesn’t come from printing a new vision statement. It comes from cleaning up what’s confusing and making a few important moves stand out.
Questions That Do the Heavy Lifting
Many organizations try to get clarity by writing better statements.
“We will be the leading provider of…” “We commit to world-class service…” “We will delight our customers…”
These lines sound good. They rarely change decisions.
Questions do.
Take one key question:
“In which areas are we truly winning today, and in which areas do we really want to win in the next three to five years?”
When you stay with this question, generic language disappears.
Managers have to point to real markets, real customers, real products. They see gaps between what they say they want and where results actually are.
They may notice that they’re “winning” in an area they no longer want to build around. They may see they are weak in an area they keep claiming is “strategic.”
From there, you can ask:
- Which of these areas could be 10x more impactful if we commit to them?
- Which areas reinforce each other if we pursue them together?
- Which areas look nice on paper but drain energy?
As you work through these questions, you gradually separate the vital few from the noisy many.
That process produces clarity.
When the Strategy Shrunk but Clarity Grew
I once worked with a leadership team that had a long list of strategic priorities.
They had 18 “key directions” on one page.
In practice, this meant nothing was truly key.
Instead of giving them a new template, I walked them through a series of questions:
- Where are we clearly winning now?
- Where do we want to win in three to five years?
- Which of these, if we choose them together, will multiply our impact?
- What gives us the best results for the effort we can realistically invest?
- What courageous move are we willing to make that we haven’t tried before?
At first, everyone defended their own items.
As they answered, some patterns emerged. Four of their 18 directions clearly reinforced each other. If they focused on those four, the others either became unnecessary or could follow later.
By the end of the day, they walked out with fewer “priorities” but a much sharper sense of how they would win.
We didn’t add more words. We removed confusion.
Clarity came from the way they examined, crafted, and defined their strategy—one question at a time.
A Conversation You Can Start This Month
You don’t need a three-day offsite to begin.
In your next leadership meeting, set a simple goal: Use strategy questions to produce clarity.
Start with this:
“List all the ways we could win. Now, which of these are 10x more impactful than the others?”
Let people brainstorm. The list may grow long. That’s fine.
Then ask:
- If we could only choose three ways to win, which three would multiply each other?
- Which of these give us the best results for the least wasted effort?
- Which move requires courage because we haven’t done it before—but fits who we want to become?
Cross out the rest.
You can revisit them someday, but they are not your strategy today.
As you narrow the list, your people will feel the tension. That’s normal. Strategy is about choice. Choice creates focus. Focus creates clarity.
Make Strategy-Driven Clarity a Habit
Clarity fades when you treat strategy as an annual event.
You secure it by turning strategic questions into a habit.
You can:
- Open key meetings with a one-sentence reminder: “These are the three ways we’ve chosen to win.”
- Ask, whenever a new project appears: “Does this support one of our chosen ways—or is it trying to add a new one?”
- Explain big decisions by linking them directly to your chosen ways to win.
Over time, people stop seeing their work as random tasks. They see their work as part of a clear, chosen play.
You’ll hear fewer questions like, “What are we really doing?” You’ll hear more comments like, “This fits our strategy,” or “This doesn’t.”
That’s what you want: strategy that actively produces clarity.
If You Want Help Doing This Work
My goal is not to hand you a thick strategy document.
My work is to help your leadership team examine, craft, and define your strategy in a way that naturally produces clarity—by asking better questions, making sharper choices, and choosing the few moves that truly multiply your impact.
In a Strategy Shift Experience, we don’t rush to fill forms. We slow down to explore how you are winning, how you want to win, and which few ways will make the biggest difference when you choose them together.
If you want your next strategy session to produce real clarity rather than another long list, you can reach out through this site.
We can design a session where you do the thinking—and clarity becomes the product of your own strategy work.
If you’re building a business and you are playing to win…
Let’s install one shift that moves metrics.
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