Strategy is not what you say. It is what the organization does.

I recently read something that made me think back over a number of companies and leadership teams I have been part of.

Most of them had a strategy.

Sometimes it was genuinely good. We had spent days discussing it. We had presentations, priorities, financial targets and a reasonably shared understanding in the leadership team of where we wanted to go.

And yet, a few months later, you could walk around the organization and see people spending enormous amounts of energy on things that had very little to do with that strategy.

Not because people were incompetent.

Not because they did not care.

And usually not because the strategy itself was wrong.

The connection between strategy and everyday work was simply too weak.

I have probably underestimated this several times during my career.

When you sit in a leadership team and have discussed the same questions for weeks, something starts to feel obvious. You know why one problem matters more than another. You remember the customer discussions, the financial numbers and the trade-offs that led to a decision.

Most of the organization was not in those discussions.

They see the resulting slide.

Perhaps they hear the CEO explain the strategy at an all-hands.

Then Monday morning arrives.

There is a customer asking for something. A system needs fixing. Sales has promised something. Someone has an idea for a new feature. A project that started six months ago is still running.

And suddenly the organization is making hundreds of small prioritization decisions every week.

That is where strategy either becomes real or slowly disappears.

I think this is one of the reasons I was drawn to the ideas behind the North Star Framework, and eventually started developing them further into something more practical for everyday leadership and execution.

Not because organizations need another strategy framework.

There are plenty of those.

What I felt was missing was something much more mundane: a visible connection between where we are going and what we are actually doing.

In its simplest form, NSF connects five things:

North Star -> Product Drivers -> Top Problems -> Current Goals -> The Work

The important part is not the terminology.

The important part is that someone should be able to look at the work being done and answer:

Why are we doing this?

What problem are we trying to solve?

What goal should it move?

And how does that ultimately contribute to where the company is trying to go?

If those questions are difficult to answer, the problem is rarely that employees need to "align better".

The organization probably needs to make the connections clearer.

That becomes even more important when things get difficult.

When revenue misses the plan. When a major customer complains. When costs need to come down. When a competitor suddenly moves. When the board changes priorities.

Under pressure, organizations tend to fall back on local optimization and short-term decisions.

A strategy that only exists in presentations is surprisingly fragile.

A strategy that is continuously connected to problems, goals and actual work has a much better chance of surviving contact with reality.

After more than 25 years in technology and product organizations, I increasingly think this is one of the central jobs of leadership.

Not to have all the answers.