If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen.

Unless leadership offers a theory of why things haven’t worked in the past, or why the challenge is difficult, it is hard to generate good strategy.

A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

For example, people tend to place more weight on vivid examples than on broad statistical evidence.

To create strategy in any arena requires a great deal of knowledge about the specifics. There is no substitute for on-the-ground experience.