Imagine your AIM Stratpage as an iceberg. What sits above the surface is what everyone sees. What sits below is what actually makes it work.
Strategy follows the same logic:
ABOVE | The strategic outcomes
The visible part of the iceberg represents your strategic outcomes. These are the results your organisation aims to deliver, the outcomes of your strategy. They reflect the value you create for the outside world: financial performance for your shareholders, differentiated value for your clients, and, increasingly and rightly so, a possible broader contribution to key stakeholders or to Society as a whole. These outcomes define success. They are what shareholders or stakeholders see, measure, and ultimately judge.
But they are only the consequence of something deeper.
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BELOW | The strategic inputs
Beneath the waterline lies the engine of your strategy. This is where you define the inputs that will produce those outcomes. Two layers matter here.
The first layer is made of your strategic levers. These are the critical transformational engines your organisation must focus on. They answer a simple but demanding question: what must we change, build, or strengthen to achieve our desired outcomes? This is where ambition becomes concrete. Each lever represents a deliberate choice about where to focus effort and energy. And this is where the cause-and-effect logic starts to take shape. If these levers are delivered, they create the conditions for the outcomes to happen.
Below these levers sit the strategic enablers. These are the core capabilities that make everything possible. Talent, technology, systems, culture, partnerships, organisational structure, etc. They may appear further down on the page, but they are absolutely foundational. Without them, the levers cannot be executed. And without the levers, the outcomes remain vague aspirations.
This is why the AIM Stratpage should not be read from top to bottom as a hierarchy of importance. What sits at the top is not more critical. It is simply more visible. The real work happens below the surface, where the inputs are defined and aligned.
A strong strategy makes this chain explicit. It connects enablers to levers, and levers to outcomes. It shows how value will be created, not just what value is expected. That’s the value of your AIM Stratpage. It is not a random list of ambitions. It is a powerful system of cause and effect.
Author: Anael Granoux | Strategy Advisor, Lecturer, Speaker