If you don’t build a strategy rhythm, you discover you’re wrong too late—after budgets, projects, and people already committed to the wrong plays. In this article, Jef Menguin shows how to validate your choices in the real world and adjust before the damage spreads. Apply the rhythm and share it with your team so you learn faster, decide cleaner, and keep winning as conditions change.
Let me start with a simple picture.
A leadership team spends time deciding how they want to win. They choose their customers. They choose where they will play. They choose how they will stand out.
For a while, the strategy feels solid. It makes sense.
Then three things happen almost at the same time.
A competitor launches a new offer. A big client changes their budget. A new rule or policy changes the landscape.
Suddenly, some parts of the strategy feel slightly off. Not all of it. Just enough to make people ask, “Do we still push this the way we planned?”
Some leaders ignore the questions and say, “We already agreed. Let’s just follow the plan.” Others quietly adjust on their own—changing things in their department without a shared conversation.
Six months later, what you have is not a living strategy. It’s a mix of old assumptions, local adjustments, and quiet confusion.
That’s why Strategy Rhythm matters.
Strategy Is Not a Script You Obey
In Strategy First, Plan Second, we separated the two: strategy decides the game, the plan organizes the work.
Too often, once a strategy is written down, people treat it like a fixed script. The unspoken rule becomes, “We already agreed. We just need to follow.”
But strategy is not a script to obey. Strategy is a set of choices you test in the real world.
Those choices are serious. You don’t change them every week. But they are also not sacred. They are your best answers for now to five big questions: what winning means, where you play, how you win, what you must be good at, and what systems will support you.
You only find out how good those answers are when you execute.
That’s why Strategy Rhythm is important. It’s your way of saying, “We will not wait twelve months to discover that we were wrong.”
Plans Are To-Do Lists. Strategy Rhythm Makes Them Smarter.
Most plans behave like to-do lists. They are full of timelines, projects, and targets. In some organizations, they feel like 12-month programs that must be completed, no matter what happens outside.
If the market stayed still, maybe that would work. But markets move. Customers change what they value. Competitors change how they play. Policy and technology change the rules.
If you treat your plan as something you must defend instead of something you can learn from, you will end up working very hard on the wrong things.
A good Strategy Rhythm does something different.
You still have your Game Plan. You still have your key plays and your priorities. You still have your projects. But every so often—usually every quarter—you stop long enough to ask: “Given what we’ve seen in execution, do our choices still make sense?”
Rhythm is not about throwing away your strategy. It is about letting reality talk to your strategy regularly.
Strategy Rhythm: Validating Strategy in Execution
Think of strategy as a set of informed bets.
You bet that these customers are worth focusing on. You bet that this way of winning will matter to them. You bet that these capabilities and systems will support that.
When you execute, you collect evidence. You see what customers actually choose. You see how competitors actually react. You see which internal moves are harder than you thought, and which ones surprise you.
If you never pause to examine that evidence, you will keep running on old bets.
Strategy Rhythm is simply the habit of stepping back at the right frequency to ask three simple things: what happened, what did we learn, and what will we change.
It is strategy meeting reality on purpose, not by accident.
A Company That Learned Faster
Let me share a company story.
They decided, using the five questions from 5 Strategy Questions for Leaders Who Play to Win, that they would win by being the most trusted and responsive partner for a specific type of client. Their Game Plan had three big plays for the year.
In the first quarter, they pushed hard on one of the plays: a new service they believed clients would love. On paper, it was beautiful. In the field, it landed softly. Clients liked it, but did not switch for it.
In an old setup, they might have said, “Well, it’s in the plan. Let’s keep pushing. Targets are targets.”
But they had started a Strategy Rhythm.
In their quarterly session, they looked at what actually happened. They listened to what sales and frontline people learned. They faced a simple truth: the new service was good, but not a strong enough reason for clients to move.
They did not throw away the whole strategy. The way they wanted to win was still right. But they adjusted one of the plays. They shifted effort to a different offer that clients were actively asking for, and redesigned the weaker play as a supporting move instead of the main hero.
Because they met strategy and execution every quarter, they learned faster. The world still moved, but they moved with it.
A Mayor Who Stopped Guessing
Now imagine a mayor.
His strategy is to make his town the easiest place in the area for small businesses to start and thrive. He has three clear plays: faster permits, better support in barangays, and visible improvements in key public spaces.
In the beginning, everyone is excited. But after a few months, he notices something. The permit process has improved on paper, but business owners still complain. Some barangays move faster than others. The public spaces are cleaner, but not yet safer.
Without a rhythm, he might just keep giving more speeches and reminders. He might blame “implementation” and hope that people get it.
With a Strategy Rhythm, he does something else.
Every quarter, he gathers his key people and asks very specific questions.
What actually changed for business owners this quarter? Where did we really make it easier—and where did we just change forms? What did we try that worked? What did we try that did not?
He does not wait until the end of his term to ask if the strategy worked. He uses every quarter to adjust the way they execute the same game.
Maybe they discover that one simple change in how information is posted saves days for applicants. Maybe they see that investing in a small mobile team to visit barangays has more impact than another big event.
The point is not that everything goes perfectly. The point is that strategy is allowed to learn, not just to sit in a speech.
What Strategy Rhythm Actually Looks Like
You don’t need an elaborate system to begin. You need a regular, protected moment.
For most organizations, quarterly works well. Some very fast-moving teams add lighter monthly check-ins. The important part is that you decide ahead of time when you will step back.
In that time, you are not just doing status reports. You are doing strategy work.
You look again at how you said you would win. You look at the plays in your Game Plan. You look at the work your people are actually doing.
Then you ask, in plain language:
Is this still the right game, given what we see? Are these still the right plays, given how customers and citizens behave? What small but real adjustments do we need to make in the next 90 days?
Sometimes the answer will be, “Yes, we stay the course, but we execute better.” Sometimes the answer will be, “We keep the strategy, but we change one of the plays.” Sometimes you will see that a part of your way of winning needs to evolve.
The key is this: you choose on purpose, not by drift.
From One Big Event to a Steady Beat
Many leaders are used to one big strategy effort, then months of silence.
Strategy Rhythm replaces that silence with a steady, honest beat.
You still respect the choices you made. You don’t panic every time something changes. But you also don’t pretend that the world will wait for you to finish your 12-month program.
Instead, you treat each quarter as a chance to validate your strategy in execution, to learn from real life, and to feed that learning back into your choices.
Over time, something important happens.
Your people stop seeing strategy as a once-a-year topic. They start seeing it as part of how you work.
They know that every quarter, you will ask if the way you are trying to win still makes sense. They know that if they learn something from customers or from the frontlines, there will be a place to bring that insight. They know that adjustments are allowed when they protect the win, not the old plan.
That is what it means to have a Strategy Rhythm that actually works.
When You’re Ready to Go Deeper
You can start with one simple move: pick a date next quarter and hold your first real Strategy Rhythm session. Bring your key people. Bring your Game Plan. Bring your curiosity.
From there, you can build.
Playing to Win helps you make the core choices. Game Plan turns those choices into clear plays. Your work on stopping what doesn’t fit frees capacity. Strategy Rhythm keeps all of that learning with you as the world changes.
The goal is not to be perfect from the start. The goal is to stop treating strategy as something you lock in once and then obey blindly.
Because in a moving world, the leaders who keep winning are not the ones with the thickest plan. They are the ones who make clear choices—and then give those choices a rhythm.
So before the next quarter comes and goes, you might want to ask:
Where, in the next 90 days, will we pause long enough to let our strategy learn?
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