Most leadership teams believe strategy is about finding answers: The right market. The right positioning. The right priorities. The right initiatives.
Boards ask for answers. Investors expect answers. Executives feel huge pressure to provide these answers.
But strategy does not start with answers. It starts with questions.
Peter Drucker warned leaders decades ago: "The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions."
That statement should sit at the centre of every strategy discussion.
Because most strategic failures do not happen due to poor execution of a clear direction. They happen because the organisation was solving the wrong problem in the first place.
When leadership teams frame the wrong questions, they can generate excellent answers that lead to mediocre outcomes. You can optimise the wrong business model. You can efficiently execute the wrong priorities. You can brilliantly solve yesterday’s problems.
In Silicon Valley, this logic is pushed even further. Warren Berger writes: “Questions are the new answers.”
That may sound like a slogan. But he has a point. A question defines the frame of thinking. It determines what is explored and what is ignored. It sets the boundaries of ambition. (Plus, I guess AI can now answers your questions).
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, once explained:
"We run the company by questions, not by answers. So in the strategy process we’ve so far formulated 30 questions that we have to answer."
Thirty clearly formulated questions guiding the strategic thinking and strategy execution. Not a 300 page deck full of conclusions. Not a collection of fashionable frameworks.
Strategy, in its essence, is not a document. It is a structured conversation about the future. And the quality of that conversation depends entirely on the quality of the questions.
Are we challenging our core assumptions? Are we confronting uncomfortable trade offs? Are we questioning the relevance of our current model? Are we asking what we must stop doing, not only what we must start?
Philosophy may be the art of asking questions (without necessarily answering them). Strategy is the art of asking the right questions (and then answer them correctly and efficiently).
So before your next strategy session, do not ask “Do we have the answers?”
Instead, ask “Are we even asking the right (and sometime uncomfortable) questions?”
Author: Anael Granoux | Strategy Advisor, Lecturer, Speaker