Roger Martin just published a piece that deserves your attention.
In "Fixing Strategy," the world's premier management thinker argues that business strategy — as a discipline — is profoundly broken. Not struggling. Not evolving. Broken.
His diagnosis is sharp: strategy is a relic of 1960s technocracy, born in an era when brilliant minds believed they could analyse their way to universal truths. Bruce Henderson founded BCG. The whiz kids ran the Vietnam War. Economists became celebrities. The implicit promise was seductive: if my IQ is higher than yours, you should do as I say.
Sixty years later, that promise lies in ruins. As Roger puts it: "Strategists can't analyse their way to great strategy — because analysis simply affirms the past. Telling your company to execute your brilliant strategy doesn't work. And telling your colleagues that they should listen to you because you are expert just pisses them off."
Hard to argue with any of that.
Roger proposes five conventions that strategy must adopt to fix itself. Reading them, I found myself nodding along — not because they were new to me, but because they articulate precisely why I built The Decision Stack.
Let me walk through his five conventions and show you how The Decision Stack operationalises each one.
Roger's Five Conventions
1. Strategy must be performed by general managers
Strategy isn't an executive function. It's not something you outsource to consultants or delegate to a Chief Strategy Officer. It's the core job of every manager at every level. They have integrative responsibility. They know their piece of the organisation better than anyone. If they can't do strategy, they shouldn't be in the role.
2. Strategy must be driven by imagination
Business exists in what Aristotle called the part of the world "that can be other than it is." You can't analyse your way to a future that doesn't exist yet. Strategy requires imagining possibilities and choosing the one for which you can make the most compelling argument. Analysis is a tool. Imagination is the engine.
3. Strategy must be guided by principles
Not rigid if/then rules. Principles. "Customer satisfaction even over margin" is a principle. It requires judgement to apply, but it guides decisions consistently. Technocrats want algorithms. Strategists need principles.
4. Strategy must be iterative
The business environment is a complex adaptive system. You can't fully understand it through analysis — no matter how much data you throw at it. You have to poke the system and learn. Build one hotel. Try one price point. Green-light one film. Then double down, adjust, or reverse. Strategy is iterative, not unitary.
5. Strategy must be distributed
This is where Roger's piece really sings. He uses the Russian matryoshka doll metaphor — each strategy choice nested within the next larger one. Corporate strategy sets context for business unit strategy, which sets context for functional strategy, all the way down.
And then he drops this: "There is no 'execution.' There are only strategy choices made at various levels of the organisation."
Read that again. There is no execution. Only choices.
The fantasy of geniuses at the top making strategy and "hapless drones below executing" is, as Roger says, "an anachronistic remnant of the technocratic age."
The Missing Piece
Roger's diagnosis is precise. His prescription is sound. But there's a gap.
How do you actually do this? How do you make strategy the job of every manager - let alone every employee? How do you ensure imagination flows through an organisation? How do you make principles visible and applicable? How do you build iteration into your operating rhythm? How do you distribute strategic choice-making without descending into chaos?
Roger doesn't say. And that's not a criticism — a 2,000-word essay can only do so much. But it's the question that matters most to practitioners.
This is why I built The Decision Stack.
The Decision Stack: The Operating System that fixes strategy
The Decision Stack is a mental model for how decisions flow through organisations. It makes visible what Roger describes — the nested, cascading nature of strategic choice.
Here's how it operationalises each of his five conventions:
Everyone Owns Strategy
The Decision Stack doesn't live in a strategy document that gets reviewed annually. It lives in the daily decisions of people at every level. When you can see how your decisions connect to the decisions above and below you, strategy stops being something the C-suite does and starts being something everyone does.
This isn't about democratising strategy into mush. The CEO still makes different decisions than an individual contributor. But both are making strategic choices — choices that shape where the company plays and how it wins. The Decision Stack makes that explicit.
Imagination Has a Container
One of the failures of traditional strategy is that imagination gets crushed by process. The annual planning cycle. The budget review. The quarterly business review. All of these rituals optimise for analysis and accountability, not imagination.
The Decision Stack creates space for "what could be" by separating levels of decision-making. At the top of the stack, you're asking fundamental questions about identity, purpose, and direction. These require imagination. Further down, you're asking how to deliver on those choices. The discipline of the stack protects imaginative work from being swamped by operational urgency.
Principles Become Visible
Roger argues for principles over rules. I agree. But principles only work if people can see them, reference them, and apply them consistently.
The Decision Stack makes principles explicit. What do we believe at the company level? How does that translate to how this business unit operates? What does it mean for this team's priorities? When principles are codified, they become usable. When they're buried in a values statement on the wall, they're decoration.
Iteration Is Built In
The Decision Stack isn't a one-time exercise. It's a living model. Because decisions at each level create context for decisions below, you build in natural feedback loops. When a team discovers their decisions aren't working, that information flows up. When the market shifts, the stack adapts.
This is fundamentally different from the traditional model where strategy is set, communicated, and then "executed" until the next planning cycle. The Decision Stack assumes the world will be other than you expected. It's designed for iteration.
Distribution Is the Whole Point
Roger's matryoshka doll metaphor is beautiful. It's also, essentially, the Decision Stack.
Each level of the stack contains the levels below it. Each decision creates the context for the next set of decisions. There's no magical line where strategy stops and execution begins. There's just a cascade of choices, each one nested within and shaped by the choices above.
When you can see the stack, you can see your choices. You can see how they connect. You can see where you have freedom and where you're constrained. You stop waiting for permission and start making the decisions that are yours to make.
This is what distributed strategy actually looks like.
The Practical Difference
I've been working with organisations to implement The Decision Stack, and the shift is palpable. Leaders stop hoarding decisions. Teams stop waiting for direction. The endless strategy-execution gap — the one that plagues every organisation I've ever seen — starts to close.
Not because people suddenly get better at "executing." But because they realise there's no such thing. There are only decisions. And when you can see how yours fit into the whole, you make better ones.
Roger Martin is right. Strategy is broken. The technocratic model has run its course.
The Decision Stack is how we build what comes next.