There is a crypt kept inside of every organization, in which a mummified figure lives. This ancient undead fellow is the origination and ongoing development of the group’s strategy. It’s a dirty secret, the place where the approach, the operating theses comes from. Why? Why can’t groups have an open conversation about strategy?
Well, for one thing, the top leader is probably being paid too much for the strategy task and spending too little time on it to earn that wage. Or there is a strategy team that is trying to convince that top leader to adopt a particular way of seeing (with limited success). Here’s the heart of the problem: strategy is not like accounting; it cannot live in a division set apart from the rest of the group. Individuals can still be paid to primarily work on and think about strategy, but these people do not “own” it (and if strategists try to own strategy, they will find themselves lonely, alienated, and ineffective).
Henry Mintzberg (probably the best contemporary management scholar) articulates that there are many facets of strategy, some more concerned with how people see things, others with what people are actually doing, still others with the past, yet others with the future. This is why the verb to strategize sounds hollow (not to mention too silly to say out loud). Strategy, like love, is a little more complicated than a single part of speech.
What are organizations concerned with mutuality to do, then? Don’t they still need to pursue strategy? Yes, and it will be a lot of different things. People with more authority than responsibility (sometimes called management) need to get closer to the things getting done and products & services being provided. If you have a call center, spend three days there listening and asking questions and you’ll be much of the way there. People doing work in staff or line functions need to believe that their voices matter in the strategy conversation. Ivory tower mentalities around the most heady of tasks prevents the people with the most relevant insights from making strategy. Find ways to give people from every part of the organization an ongoing and properly recognized role in the strategy making/changing/evaluation process.
None of this requires turning into a cooperative or embracing one-person-one-vote workplace democracy (not that you shouldn’t look into these concepts if you’re curious). It merely requires setting aside the notion that a group’s brains increase in value and efficacy as you move up the org chart. And both strategy teams and top leaders should see themselves as the facilitators and teachers of strategy skills and processes, rather than its crypt keepers.