Communicating Strategy So People Can Act on It

The tune only the tapper can hear

In 1990 a Stanford psychology student named Elizabeth Newton ran a simple game. One person tapped out the rhythm of a well-known song, such as “Happy Birthday,” on a table. Another person tried to name the song. Across 120 songs, listeners got three right: 2.5%. Before they guessed, the tappers had predicted that listeners would get half of them ⁴.

The tappers were not careless. They could hear the melody in their heads while they tapped, and they could not imagine hearing only the knocking. Chip and Dan Heath, who tell the story, call this the curse of knowledge, and they point it straight at strategy: executives speak in abstractions because the abstractions summarize years of detail they carry around, while the people on the front line hear only the knocking ⁴.

Now the corporate version. The CEO of a large technology company, which researchers Donald Sull, Charles Sull and James Yoder call Generex, was pleased with her engagement survey: 97% of senior leaders said they clearly understood the company’s priorities. Then the researchers asked the managers to write the priorities down. Only one-quarter could list three of the five. One-third of the leaders charged with carrying out the strategy could not list even one ¹.

Communicating strategy means making it usable by the people who carry it out: one page of prose that states the choice, a version for each audience, a cascade through managers who explain it in their own words, and steady repetition in meetings you already hold. Then test whether a manager can use it to pick between two good projects without escalating.

That gives this page its thesis. A strategy has been communicated only when a manager two levels down can use it to say no to a good idea. Anything less is an announcement. Most companies announce.

Every executive is a tapper. The tune is playing in their head, and nobody else can hear it.

Write one page before anyone builds a deck

Before the deck, write the strategy as one page of prose. Prose forces you to connect the parts: why this choice, why now, what it rules out. A slide with five boxes lets you skip the connections, and the connections are exactly what a manager needs to make a call on her own. The narrative memo page covers the longer form; for communication, one page is the right size.

Keep the priority list short. Of the S&P 500 companies that published their strategic objectives, 78% listed between three and five ². More than five and nobody can repeat them. Fewer than three and the page is probably a mission statement. If the team cannot agree on what belongs on the page at all, the problem is upstream of communication; what strategy is, and what it gets mistaken for is the place to start.

Then make every line concrete. The Heaths’ example is Trader Joe’s. Its formal mission, to bring customers “the best food and beverage values,” could belong to any grocer. What makes the strategy usable is the picture behind it: the target customer as an “unemployed college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo” ⁴. There are probably zero such customers in the store at any moment, as the Heaths note. It does not matter. Every employee can ask whether the professor would buy the red-pepper soup ⁴.

John Kotter offered a bar for the finished page: if you cannot communicate the vision to someone in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signals both understanding and interest, you are not done ³.

Four audiences, four jobs

The page stays the same for everyone. What changes is the job each audience has to do with it, and so the format, the depth and the ask.

The board is the one audience that should see the rejected alternatives in full. Directors are there to test whether management chose well, and they cannot do that from a description of the winner alone. The front line does not need the full page. They need to know what changes on Monday, and why.

The cliff is one level below the top

Here is the finding that should reorganize your rollout plan. In Sull, Sull and Yoder’s data, agreement on priorities fell from 51% within top teams to 22% among the senior executives who report to them, and then declined more gradually further down ¹. Strategic understanding does not fade evenly through the hierarchy. It falls off a cliff at the first step.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Those direct reports run functions, units and regions. They were not in the room when the strategy was argued out, so they heard the conclusion without the argument ¹. They are tappers’ listeners with a P&L. And because everyone below them hears the strategy in their words, the cliff gets copied all the way down.

The fix the researchers point to is specific. Across 69 survey items, the single best predictor of strategic alignment was how consistently managers, from top executives to frontline supervisors, explained their team’s priorities in terms of their unit and the company as a whole ¹. Not the CEO’s town hall. The manager’s weekly explanation.

So run the cascade through managers, one level at a time, with each level turning the strategy into goals for its own team (see cascading objectives). Done well it runs both ways, which is the idea behind catchball in Hoshin Kanri: goals go down, and questions and constraints come back up.

1. Brief the level below the top teamEach executive briefs their own direct reports in person within a week of sign-off, using the same page and the argument behind it, not just the conclusion.
2. Translate into unit goalsEach direct report drafts their unit’s goals and writes one sentence per goal linking it to a company priority.
3. Send conflicts back upUnits return conflicts, missing resources and work they propose to stop. The top team resolves them in one session.
4. Take it to every teamManagers bring the page and their unit goals into a regular team meeting and explain what changes and why.
5. Close the loop in writingCollect the questions raised at each level and answer them in one written note for everyone.

Repeat it until you are sick of it, then keep going

Kotter titled one of the eight errors in his 1995 study of transformation efforts “Undercommunicating the Vision by a Factor of Ten” ³. His arithmetic is the argument. A single meeting or memo uses about .0001% of a year’s intracompany communication, and the group that sent it is then startled that few people seem to understand. Even a leader who gives speech after speech to employee groups captures only about .0005% ³. Your message is competing with every other email, meeting and hallway conversation of the year.

Repetition does not mean more broadcasts. Kotter’s effective executives worked the message into routine business: how a proposed solution fits the bigger picture, how an employee’s behavior helps or undermines the direction in a performance appraisal, how a division is contributing in a quarterly review ³. He also notes that deeds are often the most powerful form of communication, and that nothing undermines change more than important people behaving inconsistently with their words ³.

• Open every quarterly business review with the priorities and one example of each in action.
• Tie budget and headcount requests to a named priority, and say which one when you approve or reject them.
• Use the “what we are not doing” list out loud when you turn down a project.
• Put the priorities at the top of every manager’s performance goals.
• Tell one concrete story each quarter about someone who made the trade-off the strategy intends.

That last item does more work than it looks. Stories force concrete language. FedEx, in the Heaths’ example, tells of a driver whose truck broke down in New York; she delivered packages on foot, then persuaded a competitor’s driver to take her to her last stops ⁴. A new driver hears it and knows what the job is: get the packages delivered, any way you can ⁴. No slide about reliability does that.

Test for use, not recall

Do not rely on survey items such as “I understand our strategy.” Self-ratings like that produced the 97% at Generex, where a quarter of managers could list three priorities ¹. Test instead.

1. The listing test. Ask a sample of managers at each level to write down the company’s priorities, with up to five tries. Score whether each person names at least three. This mirrors the method in the Sull research ¹.
2. The trade-off test. Give a manager a realistic choice between two worthwhile projects and ask which one the strategy favors and why. You are checking for use, not memory.
3. The translation test. Ask a manager how their team’s top goal connects to a company priority. If they cannot say, their team cannot either.
4. The stop test. Ask what their team has stopped doing because of the strategy. A strategy that stopped nothing was either never communicated or never a choice.

The fix in that example was a measure, not a message. If the scorecard pays for the old strategy, people will hear the old strategy no matter what the page says. Our page on KPIs that track strategy, not activity covers how to build the measures that carry the message for you.

The fair objection: maybe it is not a communication problem

The strongest objection to this whole page is that “communication” gets blamed for failures that live somewhere else. The strategy was never a real choice. The incentives point the other way. The top team never agreed. Sull and colleagues make a version of the point themselves: the reflex to schedule another town hall or send another email blast is understandable and unlikely to solve the problem ¹.

The objection is right, and it is the best argument for testing. The listing and trade-off tests tell you which problem you have. If the top team cannot write down the same list, the strategy is not settled, and broadcasting it will amplify the disagreement. If managers can list the priorities but choose against them, look at incentives, as the distributor did. Only when people cannot name the priorities at all is the problem mostly communication.

Start with the top team, because that is where the evidence is least comfortable. At Generex, the executives on the top team listed, between them, eight additional priorities that were not among the company’s official ones, and two did not get a single priority right despite five tries ¹. Across the companies Sull and colleagues studied, two-thirds of the top team agreed on the priorities in just 27% of cases ².

What heads of strategy get wrong

• Over-designing the launch, under-designing the second quarter. The offsite, the video and the town hall get weeks of work. The repetition plan for months four through twelve gets none. Plan the repetition first ³.
• Making the strategy team the messenger. The best predictor of alignment was managers explaining priorities, not a central team ¹. Your job is to equip the managers, then stay out of the way.
• Skipping the middle. Briefing the front line in a town hall at the same moment as their managers leaves the managers unable to answer their own teams’ questions.
• Words and deeds diverge. Approving a pet project in an area the page says you are leaving undoes months of messages in one meeting ³.
• Measuring awareness. Counting attendance and open rates tells you the message was sent. Only the trade-off test tells you it was received.

There is a political edge here too. Vagueness is sometimes deliberate. A priority written loosely enough lets every unit head see their own project in it, which makes sign-off easy and execution impossible. The fix is the “what we are not doing” line, written so a unit head can recognize their own project on it. If nobody winces at that line, it is not doing its job. Where the strategy breaks between the offsite and Monday is the subject of our page on strategy execution.

What to do Monday morning

1. Write your current strategy as one page using the six parts above. Note any part you could not fill.
2. Ask each member of the leadership team to list the priorities separately, then compare the lists.
3. Pick the level just below the top team and run the listing and trade-off tests with ten people.
4. Find one decision this month the strategy should drive, and make it visibly, with the reason stated.
5. Draft the repetition plan: which existing meetings will carry the message for the next two quarters.

The tappers in Newton’s game were sure the song was obvious. So is every leadership team that has spent six months inside its own strategy. The cure is not to tap louder. It is to hand the listener the words, check whether they can sing it back, and then watch whether they use it to say no.

If it can’t help someone turn down a good idea, it hasn’t been communicated.

Questions

What is strategy communication?

Strategy communication is the work of making a strategy usable by the people who carry it out. It includes a written statement of the choice and the priorities, versions for the board, leadership team, managers and front line, a cascade through each management level, repetition in routine meetings, and tests of whether people can name the priorities and use them to make trade-offs.

How many strategic priorities should a company communicate?

Three to five is the practical range. Research by Donald Sull and colleagues found that 78% of S&P 500 companies that published their objectives listed between three and five. Beyond five, managers struggle to remember them, and the list stops forcing trade-offs between good ideas. Fewer than three usually means the list is a mission statement rather than a set of choices.

Why don’t employees understand the strategy?

Usually because the top team is not aligned, the message skips managers, or it is written in abstractions. Sull, Sull and Yoder found the sharpest drop in understanding between the top team and their direct reports. The strongest predictor of alignment in their survey was managers consistently explaining how their team’s priorities connect to their unit and to the company.

How do you measure whether a strategy has been communicated?

Ask people to list the priorities instead of rating their own understanding. Score whether each person names at least three, at each level of the organization. Add a trade-off test: give a manager a real choice between two projects and ask which one the strategy favors and why. Repeat the test after each communication cycle to see whether it improved.

Where to go next

• The Narrative Memo: Template and Method
• Strategy Execution: Where It Breaks Between the Offsite and Monday
• Cascading Objectives
• Execution Gap
• Strategy Narrative Builder (free outline)