Strategy is a Verb: Building Certainty Through Action

At senior levels, people speak more. That is not a flaw, but a part of the role. The higher one rises, the more one must work in concepts, in systems, in abstraction. Precision is traded for perspective. One leaves behind the details of implementation to focus on alignment, direction, and impact. The boat must be steered.

However, here is the paradox: one cannot steer well until the boat is in motion.

Certainty does not precede action. It follows it. No amount of planning, modelling, or ideation will replace what a small, purposeful test can reveal. Yet organisations often waste months sketching ideas on whiteboards, believing clarity to be a prerequisite for movement. It is not.

The best leaders act. Not rashly, not carelessly, but with deliberate, scoped experiments that build the confidence required to commit further. They do not fear being incorrect. They fear remaining still.

Leadership is not about having the perfect answer. It is about creating the conditions in which better answers emerge. That means privileging progress over polish, feedback over fantasy, and decisions over delays.

It means recognising that the role is not merely to conceptualise. It is to think well enough to act, and then to act often enough to learn.

The Trap of Endless Conceptualisation

Strategy requires altitude, but altitude distorts detail. From high up, every path appears equally clear until one walks it. In many organisations, this creates a dangerous illusion: that the right plan will unlock the right outcomes. Thus teams talk, map, diagram, and debate. They seek more context, more data, more alignment, but rarely more traction.

This mirrors a familiar engineering trap: endlessly designing the perfect architecture instead of delivering something useful. Ironically, many leaders who over-index on conceptual purity inherited that posture from earlier roles where they never had to bear the cost of delivery. They were not truly senior engineers, merely well-spoken ones. Endless conceptualisation is not a sign of discipline. It is often a lack of nerve disguised as rigour.

The Virtue of Early Motion

Clarity is emergent. It arises through action. Small actions, well framed, create information. Every prototype, every pilot, every rough draft sharpens the strategic picture.

Trying is not guessing. Trying is engaging the system.

When one moves early, one gains more space to learn, to adjust, and to lead. One demonstrates courage, endorses accountability, and accepts failure as part of the learning process. One signals confidence, not in being correct, but in the capacity to respond.

Leadership Is Decision-Making, Not Perfect Knowing

Too often, leaders wait for certainty before making a decision. However, too much knowledge can blur the decision-making process. Real leadership is not about perfect understanding, but about knowing just enough to act. One must judge the right amount of information required, and then proceed.

Look at the moon, not the finger pointing to it. By allocating the appropriate level of focus to the appropriate amount of insight, a leader naturally finds a reason to begin.

Consider a customer facing team that waits an entire quarter to perfect a complex feature. When they finally release it, they receive negative feedback that could have been captured with a basic prototype weeks earlier. The cost of delay is not merely time. It is lost trust, missed customer insights, and reduced competitive edge. By waiting, they did not avoid failure.. They simply postponed learning and weakened their position. Instead of learning quickly, they postponed failure and delayed progress.

Or take customer-facing teams that depend on internal platform capabilities. Instead of collaborating on a visionary, shared platform model and helping attract top talent, they flood the platform team with low-leverage requests and toil. This behaviour overwhelms the platform with operational noise, leaving little room for long-term investment or strategic alignment. It reinforces silos, undermines trust, and creates systemic inertia. The result is a deadlock, not a partnership.

In both cases, movement, early, thoughtful movement, would have changed the outcome. Avoiding decisions is often disguised as diligence. Yet delay rarely improves the outcome. It merely defers the moment of reckoning.

Strategy as a Feedback Loop

True strategy is not a master plan. It is a learning loop. The best strategies evolve as the team interacts with the environment. Leaders must design the loop: decide, test, sense, and adjust. Not once, but continuously.

Become the essence of agility oneself. As in certain Eastern philosophies, become one with the rhythm of small iterations, a loop of virtue that refines judgement, systems, and impact. By balancing the appropriate level of experimentation, one not only advances the strategy but often arrives at the correct solution without deploying everything. Just enough. Just in time.

In complex systems, linear plans fail. Adaptive systems thrive. And adaptation begins with movement.

Culture Follows Cadence

Teams replicate what leaders model. A leader who takes small, well-framed actions fosters a culture that learns. A leader who waits fosters a culture that withers.

Worse, prolonged waiting creates a culture of excuse. It rewards smooth talkers over practitioners, nurtures procrastination under the guise of caution, and suggests that inaction is safer than engagement. This does not protect the organisation. It weakens it. Over time, this mindset erodes ambition, undermines accountability, and fosters an environment where avoiding blame takes precedence over delivering value.

In the end, the most effective way to improve thinking is to move smarter.

Steer the boat while it sails. Build certainty while in motion. Lead by doing.