The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.

A leader’s most important responsibility is identifying the biggest challenges to forward progress and devising a coherent approach to overcoming them. In contexts ranging from corporate direction to national security, strategy matters. Yet we have become so accustomed to strategy as exhortation that we hardly blink an eye when a leader spouts slogans and announces high-sounding goals, calling the mixture a “strategy.

How someone can see what others have not, or what they have ignored, and thereby discover a pivotal objective and create an advantage, lies at the very edge of our understanding, something glimpsed only out of the corner of our minds. Not every good strategy draws on this kind of insight, but those that do generate the extra kick that separates “ordinary excellence” from the extraordinary.

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.

But good strategy looks past these issues to what is fundamental. From that perspective, the threats to the company are not specific new products or competitive moves, but changes that undermine the logic of its design.

An exogenous wave of change is like the wind in a racing boat’s sails. It provides raw, sometimes turbulent, power. A leader’s job is to provide the insight, skill, and inventiveness that can harness that power to a purpose.