Clearly communicating your strategy is essential if you want to make your vision for your business a reality.

Without a strategy that your leaders (and your leaders’ teams) can understand, your vision is destined to remain just that: a mere vision.

As well as being easy to understand, your strategy needs to be memorable, inspiring, and easy for your employees to incorporate into their day-to-day work.

But, in our experience, few corporate strategies meet these standards. All too often, a company’s articulation of its strategy takes the form of a 17-page, jargon-stuffed PowerPoint deck that demonstrates little regard for white space.

Fine for a first draft, perhaps. But unfit for purpose if the goal is to get buy-in from the whole org.

Here’s how to turn your overdense strategy deck into an inspiring rallying cry that all your employees will want to get behind.

1. Strategy starting point: work back from your why

The starting point for your strategy should always be your vision — the big, audacious goal you’re striving toward.

That vision shouldn’t simply set a target (number of customers, say). It should also convey a sense of why that target matters.

How will the world be different once our vision is achieved?
How will pursuing our strategy make life better for the human race?
Why should we feel good about ourselves if we succeed?

Answer these questions and you’ll be halfway to bringing your team with you.

2. Consult widely on your strategy, but don’t draft by committee

It’s not unusual for a strategy deck to exhibit “kitchen-sink syndrome” — i.e., everything thrown in there, with little sense of what matters most. Invariably, such a deck gets that way by being the product of multiple hands (aka “too many cooks”).

A robust strategy will undoubtedly have input from many minds. But at some point, you need to step away to see the wood from the trees.

The fewer people involved in the process of distilling everyone’s ideas, the more powerful the articulation of your strategy will be.

3. Beware “PowerPoint thinking” in your strategy deck

Those 17-page strategy decks that are typical of so many orgs? Not only are they wordy and dense. Invariably, they’re visually overwhelming, too.

Often, that’s thanks to an over-reliance on tools like PowerPoint’s SmartArt feature, which promises to do a lot of the “thinking” for you.

Want to suggest a:

hierarchy of priorities?
matrix of products?
process for innovation?

Bingo! SmartArt has the graphic for you!

The problem with presenting info in SmartArt form is that it places a greater burden of interpretation on your reader.

Connections that, perhaps, seemed obvious to you at the time may not be so obvious to someone coming to your material for the first time.

Which is why an overly graphic strategy deck can be confusing at best, misleading at worst.

4. Ditch abstract jargon for the concrete actions at the heart of your strategy

Is your strategy deck stuffed with phrases like driving sustainable value creation through service personalization?

Abstract jargon like this is hard to understand — and easy for people to hide behind.

The more concrete you make your language, the more likely people will do what you need them to do.

Which is clearer:

Implementing a multi-channel engagement framework

or

We will build an app for customers

5. The language of a successful strategy 1: make imperative verbs do most of the work

The purpose of a strategy is to incite people to take the actions you want them to take. So much of your strategy should be expressed as verbs — or action words.

And the most powerful types of verb are imperative verbs — i.e., ones that give a command or instruction like:

Build x
Create y
Change z

Can you hear how much more urgent these sound than a statement like our strategy is sustainable value creation through service personalization?

6. The language of a successful strategy 2: learn from the demagogues

Want to know another problem with phrases like implementing a multi-channel engagement framework and sustainable value creation through service personalization?

They are weaklings in an ongoing fight for your employees’ attention, in which you are up against heavyweights such as:

TikTok influencers
Tabloid headline writers
Trump

Yes, even those of us who aren’t MAGA-adjacent can learn from the likes of Trump, whose rhetoric is based on repeating short, punchy, slogans.

Which phrase are you more likely to remember this time tomorrow: Drill, Baby, Drill or sustainable value creation through service personalization?

So make the headlines of your strategy easy to recall and repeat. As the saying goes: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

How to communicate your strategy so employees understand it