By now, many of you have been through your annual strategy retreat. How did it go?

Too often, this is what happens next:

What hurts most is that everyone poured their heart into this. Didn’t you?

You locked yourself away. You had good debates. Which turned into heated discussions. And still, you landed on something that feels really good. It’s logically sound. It’s brave. It’s clear.

So what happened between the retreat and this chart?

Often, I hear it’s an “execution problem”.

I don’t buy it. It’s a relay problem. The clarity from the retreat doesn’t make it to the team.

Which is unsurprising when you think about it: The people at the top feel the most clarity (of course). They were in the room where every nuance was debated. Every trade off considered. Every slide refined.

But then, the announcement was made in typical committee fashion. Made to survive 12 rounds of approval, including every nuance, using general language that applies to every single special case.

Rather than as a pass-along ready version that survives 100 rounds of the telephone game between colleagues in the hallway.

A very simple framework you can use for your messaging is the PATH checklist from my latest book.

Is your announcement …

• Plain and simple so that everyone can understand it?
• Actionable so that everyone knows what it means for the choices they have to make each and every day?
• Transformative so that the team sees how this will actually change things in a meaningful way?
• Heartfelt so that we actually believe in it?

Most strategy announcements check only one (guess which).

But if you manage to check all four, the graph will look very different in your organization.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael