What are the stages of excellence in strategy?

Strategy capability develops through five stages — from Lagging, where a list of goals impersonates a strategy, to Leading, where choices are sharp enough to be costly and the organisation turns on evidence before the market forces it. The stages are assessed across five dimensions: the strategy itself, facts and foresight, advantage, resourcing and commitment, and execution and adaptation. The most common finding in nearly three decades of strategy reviews: most firms sit one stage left of where their leadership believes they are — and the gap is usually in resourcing, not thinking.

The five stages, in strategy terms

• Lagging — the goals ARE the strategy: a revenue target and a percentage, with no diagnosis, no exclusions, and a budget that is last year's plus inflation.
• Basic — a strategy document exists from the last planning cycle; the top team knows its themes, two levels down it is rumour, and nothing was ever ruled out.
• Competent — a written diagnosis names the real challenges; explicit where-to-play and how-to-win choices exist; priorities are visibly resourced; strategic progress is reviewed separately from monthly operations.
• Advanced — choices came from a genuine options process; the momentum case (where current course leads in five years) is written down; assumptions carry indicators and triggers; resource allocation is re-argued from the strategy each cycle.
• Leading — the strategy is used daily to make decisions without asking; exits happen without sentiment; the business holds course under noise and turns early on signal.

The five dimensions a strategy assessment covers

1. The strategy itself — can leaders retell it consistently, does it face the real challenge, were real choices made, do the pieces reinforce each other, and are goals agreed rather than impersonating strategy?
2. Facts & foresight — market granularity, honest own-economics (where value actually concentrates), privileged insight, and how trends and uncertainty are handled.
3. Advantage — a named, evidenced source of advantage; honest ability-to-win by segment; capabilities that match the choices; anticipated competitor response.
4. Resourcing & commitment — whether money and people follow the strategy, the shape of the initiative portfolio, whether anything is ever stopped, and whether choices survive contact.
5. Execution, learning & adaptation — translation into action, communication and buy-in, review cadence, watched assumptions, and measures that lead the financials.

The archetypes that recur

Score patterns cluster into recognisable types: the Dreamers (a well-articulated strategy the budget has never met), the Machine Without a Map (disciplined delivery of an undefined direction), the Analysts (an excellent fact base admired from a safe distance), the Gamblers (bold, committed choices resting on instinct), and the Drifters (no strategy machinery at all). Each has a known remedy — and none of them is fixed by a strategy offsite.

The cheapest strategy tool that exists

Before any assessment, write the momentum case: an honest projection of where the current course lands the business in five years if nothing changes, using the last three years' actual trends rather than the budget. In our experience it is the fastest way to convert comfort into urgency — and businesses that cannot write it are usually at Lagging on more dimensions than they expect.

How to assess your own strategy

A note on what you will not find here: no email wall before the check, no sales call after it, and no private benchmark database. The report is yours; comparisons are anonymised and shown only with their sample size.

Two questions predict most of the rest: if your top five leaders each wrote the strategy down from memory, how similar would the five versions be — and when the strategy changed, did the budget change with it? If either answer is uncomfortable, a structured stages-of-excellence assessment will locate the weakness precisely across 23 practices, and name the archetype you're living in.