A strategy statement has one job: It must help people decide.

Every day across your organization, teams face choices about what to build, fund, prioritize, or abandon. Strategy exists to guide those choices.

Sounds good in theory, but we both know that in practice, it’s almost never that simple. You’ve certainly been in a meeting where that became obvious. The one that got tense when two execs came to opposite conclusions and both of them justified it with “the strategy.”

But you know what? That tense meeting is actually good news. It’s how good ideas become great strategies.

You can think of each decision under a strategy as an experiment. Every time a team uses the strategy to make a decision, the organization learns something about the idea behind it.

Sometimes the choice is straightforward. That’s a validation. Sometimes it exposes ambiguity that needs to be fixed.

Either way, the strategy becomes SHARP through use. Great strategies almost never arrive as finished declarations, but as ideas that are tested against real decisions and refined each time they reveal confusion. Over and over again.

So, how do you deliberately embrace that process?

Here’s a simple way to think about it. When you recognize a tension, go through this loop:

S: Say it simply
Use the most plain and simple words you can find.

H: Hold it up against a real decision
Listen carefully for how others use it in the conversation.

A: Analyze the ambiguity
Pinpoint exactly which words created the competing interpretations.

R: Refine the words
Don’t scrap the whole strategy. Rewrite exactly those words.

P: Prove it works or repeat
Re-apply it to the decision and, if necessary, restart the loop.

That’s it.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

PS: My book The PATH to Strategic Impact has many real life examples of sharp strategy communication.