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This article first appeared on Businesssuite Online.

An awkward silence falls over boardrooms when directors flip through a newly printed plan and instantly recognise it. To their frustration, almost nothing has changed since the last one done five years before. Despite clearly stated expectations, little has shifted. So what’s missing?

The reason the strategic logic remained unchanged (and your company didn’t move up the Businessuite Top 100 list) is usually blamed on the executive team. Not enough creativity. Not willing to challenge assumptions. Not able to rigorously examine calcified, stale doctrines.

Unfortunately, rotating C-Suiters doesn’t work. Neither does a demand for bolder thinking. Or outside experts who merely recycle known frameworks.

But before you intervene, consider the actual inputs which feed into the process. Your senior team reads the same Harvard Business Review articles as others in the region. They listen to the same lecturers explain the same frameworks. They follow the same big players.

And when they reach for inspiration, they draw from the same narrow pool as always. This is why regardless if you replace the entire C-Suite tomorrow, the next plan will look the same.

The condition is called “input homogeneity.” Same inputs = same outputs. Here is a way to intervene in even the most stubborn situations.

The Ghost Conversation

There is an element of the overall discussion which takes place in every company…but not in the formal process. Where does it happen? In the car park, over drinks, or in the hallway between sessions. The topic? A threat only addressed in quiet tones.

It never makes it onto a slide deck, but it keeps senior executives up at night due to its power and danger. The single-revenue dependency. The demographic shift. The regulatory change. The new technology tearing up the industry in Asia.

You know which conversation this is at your company. (And even if you belong to the public sector, you are well aware of defunded organisations which lost their way, only to be folded meekly into others.)

The reason these discussions remain informal is not cowardice.

Instead, the common three-to-five-year planning horizon is just short enough to filter out these questions. Why? Inside the usual retreat, everyone unconsciously assumes the current business model will survive… ”it only needs a few tweaks.” The industry structure is also accepted: it won’t change either.

Nobody has to challenge these assumptions because the truncated window makes them seem reasonable. Plus, your incentives reward confident planners, not the ones that point out uncomfortable vulnerabilities.

Consequently, the most strategically valuable conversation in the company remains permanently and repeatedly excluded from the corporate strategy.

Three Inputs That Change Everything

If the problem is structural, so is the fix. Forgo reshuffling the C-Suite, and craft three fresh inputs instead.

Stretch the horizon. In your next session, ask the team to select a new time frame between 15-30-years. Not to forecast, because no-one can predict that far. Consider this a stress test of your company’s “winning” formula, if it follows the current path.

The gap between the projected faraway future and your likely, default trajectory shows the reality you must confront. You will find that a longer window does not necessarily produce better predictions. But it will produce better (but uncomfortable) questions, the kind a five-year horizon conveniently avoids – but shouldn’t.

Contaminate the reference base. Stop benchmarking only your direct competitors. Introduce strategic patterns from industries and geographies your team has never studied. When a Caribbean financial services firm studies how a logistics company in Southeast Asia restructured its value chain, the specific details are irrelevant. But the unfamiliar pattern breaks the grooves worn by years of studying the usual suspects. (Recommendation: use my compilation of cases at StratCinema.org to be efficient.)

Formalise the ghost conversation. Create a structured session — early in the process, not as an afterthought — where you explicitly ask the team to name the slow-burning threats everyone discusses privately.

This is not just brainstorming.

It is a permission structure. Most executives will not raise existential concerns unless the architecture of the session boldly invites them to.

Picture the boardroom again. The directors open the new plan. They begin reading. And for the first time in a decade, no one recognises it. Not because it is reckless, but because it addresses questions, the previous plans were incapable of asking.

It names what everyone knew but nobody had been permitted to say aloud. The team sitting around the table is the same one that produced the last plan. But the talent didn’t change. The inputs did.

The CEO who engineers that moment won’t need to explain what strategic leadership looks like. The room will already know.

There is a specific kind of professional humiliation that doesn’t arrive with a bang. It sneaks in quietly, while you’re nodding, performing competence, convinced the conversation is going well.

Mine arrived fifty minutes into a live podcast recording with Seth Godin.

I was mid-interview. The mic was hot. And somewhere between his twelfth and thirteenth story, I heard myself say — out loud, on the record — “I don’t know how that magic works, because I don’t have anywhere near as many stories.”

Not to a colleague afterward. Not in a private debrief. To Seth. Live. While we were still recording.

That sentence has followed me since.

What I Watched Happen in One Hour

In sixty minutes, Seth Godin moved through fourteen distinct stories. Not anecdotes he was winging. Not tangents. Fourteen purposeful, precisely deployed narratives — each one doing specific work, each one landing cleanly and then stepping aside.

A hospital crib factory in Buffalo. A Walmart auditorium in Arkansas. A Google homepage with two links. A grease-covered piece of equipment that nobody had touched in a decade.

Every single one hit. Every single one served a function.

And I sat there with my small, carefully curated collection of retreat-tested stories — organised around a single argument about time horizons — and realised I had been confusing a handful of tools with an actual toolkit.

That’s not a library. That’s a filing cabinet with three folders.

The Research I Did After

The interview shook me enough to investigate. What exactly was Seth doing, and how consistently was he doing it?

With AI assistance, I pulled and analysed twelve recent Seth Godin interviews. Across all of them, he averaged 11.08 stories per conversation — 133 stories in total. His most recent book, This is Strategy, contains 87 stories.

So I asked him directly: “Is your list of stories infinite?”

His answer was more useful than I expected. “No,” he said. “And the best consultants carry around twenty stories.”

Twenty. Not two hundred. Not a bottomless archive. Twenty stories — known intimately, deployable on demand, calibrated for different rooms and different audiences. He compared it to master magicians: the great ones haven’t perfected a hundred tricks. They’ve mastered around a dozen, and they know exactly when to use each one.

Twenty stories. That’s the target. And most of us — including me, before that interview — couldn’t name five that we genuinely owned.

What Gladwell Does That Most Strategists Don’t

Malcolm Gladwell — bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Outliers, and Blink — operates on a similar principle, and his method is almost shamelessly transparent once you see it.

He never opens with a thesis. Never. There is always a human scene first. A hockey player’s birth month. A recipe for ketchup. A single moment of lived experience that drops you into a specific world before you’ve had time to raise your defenses.

Only once your attention is captured does he pull back to reveal the larger pattern.

And then — this is the part most people miss — he withholds the ending deliberately. He tells ninety percent of the story, pauses to layer in research, context, and argument, and only then closes the loop. By the time he delivers the conclusion, you’ve been waiting for it. You feel the release.

None of that is improvised. It is a deliberate system, engineered to do one specific thing: name what the audience already senses, but cannot articulate.

Seth described this in our conversation with a fundraising example. A skilled fundraiser, he said, doesn’t open with statistics about hunger. They open with a question: “What was it like at your dinner table growing up?” The data comes later. The story opens the door.

Both men are doing the same thing: uncovering the story that gives language to something the audience already intuitively knows. Seth calls this “profound” — not the delivery of new information, but the gift of precision to an existing intuition.

That is a fundamentally different job than most executives think storytelling does.

The Real Problem With How Strategists Use Stories

Most executives use stories as decoration. They drop one in to break up a dense presentation, to humanise a slide, to get a laugh after a difficult section.

That’s not what Godin and Gladwell are doing. Their stories aren’t decoration. They’re load-bearing. Remove them and the entire argument collapses.

The distinction matters enormously in strategy work. When you’re trying to shift how an organisation thinks about time, risk, or change — data alone does not move people. People need a narrative frame before they can absorb an argument. Stories aren’t the soft packaging around the hard thinking. They are the thinking, made transmissible.

Which means the question isn’t whether you have stories. Everyone has stories. The question is whether you have the right ones — ones that will actually land with your specific audience, in your specific context, under pressure.

Right now, most senior professionals cannot answer that question with any confidence.

Building the Library

Here is the uncomfortable truth: the gap Seth exposed cannot be closed by reading more books, attending more conferences, or taking another course.

It requires a different kind of discipline — one that is specific, deliberate, and ongoing.

Start with genuine curiosity. Not with what you think you should know, but with what actually pulls your attention. The stories that stick with you across months and years are telling you something about what you uniquely see that others miss. That’s the foundation.

Then do the work: find stories worth keeping, stress-test whether they will land with your audiences, organise them so they are retrievable under pressure — not just vaguely remembered — and practise the telling until it no longer feels like performance.

The raw material is everywhere. Platforms built for deliberate curation of strategic content exist precisely for this purpose. Decades of interviews, documentaries, case studies, and executive conversations are available to anyone willing to approach them with intention rather than passive consumption.

The constraint isn’t access. The constraint is discipline.

Seth’s number is twenty. Yours might be fewer. But you need to know which stories they are — you need to own them, not just have encountered them — and most of us, if we’re honest, are nowhere close.

The Sentence That Changed My Practice

I didn’t plan to be candid on that podcast. The confession about my own story gap wasn’t scripted vulnerability. It was the involuntary, real-time recognition of a professional blind spot I had been carrying for years without knowing it.

That’s how these things tend to arrive. Not in a structured self-assessment. Not in a performance review. In the middle of a live conversation with someone who has simply done the work you haven’t.

The question isn’t whether you’re a good strategist. You may well be exceptional at frameworks, diagnosis, and execution planning.

The question is whether your stories can do what Seth Godin’s stories do — open a door, name what your audience already senses, and make your argument not just understandable but felt.

If you’re not sure, that uncertainty is your answer.

Start building the library.

P.S. — The Curation Problem Has a Starting Point

If the article resonated, part of your next step is finding the right raw material — stories worth adding to your library, told by people who actually know how to tell them.

That’s exactly what StratCinema was built for. It’s a curated video platform for strategy professionals — not an algorithm feeding you whatever keeps you scrolling, but a deliberately assembled collection of interviews, case studies, and executive conversations selected because they carry genuine strategic weight.

Think of it as the opposite of YouTube’s recommendation engine.

If you’re serious about building your story library with intention, it’s a useful place to start: StratCinema.org

P.P.S. — Five Prompts to Go Deeper (Use These With Any LLM)

The ideas in this article are a door. These prompts help you walk through it.

1. Audit Your Current Story Library “I’m a [role] working with [type of clients/organisations]. I want to identify the strategic stories I currently rely on. Help me audit them by asking me questions one at a time — what the story is, what argument it supports, and whether it would land with different audience types.”
2. Reverse-Engineer a Master Storyteller “Analyse how Seth Godin uses stories in his writing and speaking. What structural patterns does he use consistently? Give me five specific techniques I can practise, with an example of each.”
3. Find Stories Hidden in Your Own Experience “I’m going to describe three professional situations I’ve been in. For each one, help me identify whether there’s a story worth keeping — one that names something an audience already senses but can’t articulate. Ask me to describe the first situation.”
4. Build a Story for a Specific Strategic Argument “I need to make the argument that [insert your strategic point] to an audience of [insert audience]. Don’t give me data or frameworks. Help me find or construct a story that opens a door to this idea — something human and specific that lands before I introduce the argument.”
5. Design Your Personal Twenty-Story Repertoire “Seth Godin says the best consultants carry around twenty stories. Help me design mine. Based on my work in [field/industry], what categories of stories should I have in my library? Give me a framework for organising them by purpose — not by topic — so I can retrieve the right one under pressure.”

These work best when you treat the LLM as a thinking partner rather than a search engine. Push back on its answers. Ask it to go deeper. The prompts are a start — the conversation is the work.

Picture a familiar scene in a non-profit organization. A hotel conference room. Flip charts on easels. A two-day offsite that everyone has blocked out on their calendar and quietly dreaded.

The exercises begin. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Stakeholder maps. Priority matrices. The team engages dutifully, filling in the boxes, generating the language that planning retreats are supposed to generate.

Then comes the afternoon slump – and it is not just fatigue from the morning’s work. Something more specific has happened. The conversation has drifted away from the reason the organisation exists. Words like “competitive positioning” and “market capture” are appearing on the sticky notes, and they feel borrowed – like wearing a suit that belongs to someone else.

Nobody says anything. Everyone is willing the process to work.

A document emerges by the final session. The board receives it at the next meeting. And within a few months, it occupies a shelf or a folder, largely untouched.

This is not a story about poor facilitation or disengaged leadership. It is a story about using the wrong instrument for the job.

Where These Frameworks Actually Come From

Management strategy as a discipline has a particular genealogy. The models that dominate executive education – the competitive analyses, the positioning matrices, the market share battles – were developed with a specific type of organisation in mind: businesses that survive or collapse based on their ability to outperform rivals and make profits.

The evidence is in the curriculum. Academic research suggests that the vast majority of MBA case material is drawn from industries where competition is the central organising tension. The mental model underneath most strategy training treats the world as a contest. There is a prize. There are opponents. The goal is to win more than you lose.

That framing is genuinely useful for firms operating in those conditions. The urgency of a competitor threatening your revenue is real, and tools designed around that urgency have genuine motivating power.

But take those same tools into a cooperative, a trade association, a government agency, or a development organisation, and something goes wrong almost immediately. (The same applies to a monopoly.) The animating force – the rival who might take what is yours – does not exist in the same way. Frameworks engineered around that force become awkward, like running software on a system it was never designed for.

The afternoon energy drop at your retreat was not a morale problem. It was the sound of a square peg meeting a round hole.

The Timeframe Problem Nobody Talks About

The mismatch runs deeper than vocabulary, though.

Competitive strategy is built around a particular relationship with time – specifically, a short one. The frameworks that dominate business education are oriented toward near-term results: quarterly performance, annual targets, the speed of response to a market threat.

Mission-driven organisations often operate under an entirely different time logic. A land trust working to preserve ecosystems, a credit union serving underbanked communities, a health institution building public capacity – these organisations are answerable to timescales that most competitive strategy tools cannot even see.

When a long-horizon organisation runs its strategy through a short-horizon framework, something gets quietly distorted. The institution begins optimising for the measurable and the near-term, while the foundational commitments – the ones that justify the organisation’s existence – drift into the background.

The Co-operative Group in the United Kingdom offers a sobering case study. Once among the most significant member-owned enterprises in the world, the Co-op entered the 2010s in serious trouble. An investigation into its near-collapse revealed a decade of decisions shaped by competitive growth logic: major retail acquisitions, banking mergers, rapid diversification across sectors. The goal had been scale – more market presence, more revenue streams, more assets.

What the organisation had not been tracking with the same rigour was whether any of this expansion was coherent with what a cooperative is actually for. Its governance was member-based. Its legitimacy came from community trust. Its identity was inseparable from a set of values about how business ought to be conducted.

By the time a £1.5 billion hole appeared in the banking arm, the institution had been operating with someone else’s strategy for years. The tools it had borrowed rewarded growth metrics. They had no mechanism for asking whether growth was serving the mission – or consuming it.

The same drift appears in organisations across every sector.

• A humanitarian agency that chases high-visibility donor projects at the expense of quiet, unglamorous long-term work.
• A professional body that adds revenue streams until its membership can no longer articulate what the body stands for.
• A regional development authority that reports on outputs while the underlying social fabric it was created to strengthen continues to fray.

In each case, the damage is slow and largely invisible inside the planning documents that caused it.

Planning Built Around Purpose

What these organisations need is not a modified version of competitive planning. They need a process that begins with a different assumption — that strategy is about protecting and advancing a purpose across time, not about positioning against opponents.

1. Such a process starts with an honest reckoning with the present. Before any direction is set, the organisation needs to understand where it actually stands – not just financially, but in terms of mission integrity. How is trust held among the people the organisation serves? When has the institution historically drifted from its purpose, and what triggered those moments? What resources – financial, relational, reputational – are genuinely available?
2. From that foundation, a long horizon is established. Somewhere between fifteen and thirty years is typically productive. This might feel uncomfortably distant, but the distance is the point. It shifts the planning conversation away from quarterly anxieties and toward the questions that actually define an institution’s legacy.
3. With a target horizon in place, the team explores a range of possible futures rather than committing to a single premature forecast. The world in twenty-five years will be shaped by forces that cannot be predicted with precision – demographic shifts, technological change, political reconfigurations, ecological pressures. Scenario thinking does not pretend otherwise. It builds the capacity to navigate uncertainty rather than deny it, and it asks the organisation to identify which kind of future best allows its mission to flourish.
4. From a single chosen scenario, the planning process works backwards. If the organisation needs to be in a certain condition twenty-five years from now, what does the ten-year mark look like? The five-year mark? What must be in place, and by when? What are the big tradeoffs which need to be made? This backward mapping turns an inspiring long-term vision into a logical chain of necessary steps, each grounded in the one that follows it.
5. Only after that work is complete does it make sense to design a short-term action plan – because now there is a genuine strategic context for it. Immediate decisions are no longer just reactive. They serve something larger. Here, further tradeoffs must be made.

The Question Underneath the Question

The mechanics matter, but the conceptual shift matters more.

Competitive strategy is structured around the question: How do we beat them? Purpose-driven strategy is structured around a different one: How do we remain who we are, and do what we exist to do, across the years ahead?

These produce very different conversations – different discussions at leadership retreats, different criteria for investment decisions, different definitions of success that get embedded in the culture over time.

Cooperatives, civil society organisations, public institutions, and social enterprises are not inferior versions of private companies. They are different kinds of institutions altogether, built on different social contracts, accountable to different stakeholders, and serving purposes that exist precisely because markets and competitive logic have limits.

The strategy process these organisations use should reflect that – not apologise for it.

When the next retreat in your non-profit ends with a document that finally stays off the shelf, it will be because the planning process started from the right place: not how do we win, but how do we endure, and why does it matter that we do.

—————————————

P.S. Here are some LLM prompts you can use for further investigation.

Go Deeper: Five Prompts for Further Exploration

The argument in this article points to a gap — between the strategy tools most executives have been given and the organisations they are actually leading. The five prompts below are designed for use with any AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or similar). Each one picks up where the article leaves off. Copy, paste, and adapt the parts in brackets to your own context.

Prompt 1: Diagnose Your Own Organisation

For the reader who finished the article thinking — “this is us.”

I lead a [cooperative / government agency / NGO / family business / religious institution / statutory body] in [country/region]. Based on the argument that most strategy frameworks were designed for competitive, profit-first organisations, help me diagnose whether my organisation has been using the wrong strategy tools.

Ask me five diagnostic questions — one at a time, waiting for my answer before moving to the next — that will reveal whether our strategy process is genuinely built around our mission and long time horizon, or whether we have been borrowing competitive frameworks that don’t fit.

After my five answers, give me an honest assessment of where we stand, and identify the single most dangerous misfit between the tools we are using and the organisation we actually are.

Prompt 2: Rebuild the Co-op’s Strategy — Non-Competitively

For the reader who found the Co-operative Group case study instructive and wants to go deeper.

The UK Co-operative Group’s near-collapse in 2013 has been attributed to governance failure and poor management. But a different diagnosis is possible: the Co-op was a mission-first, member-owned organisation that had adopted competitive private-sector strategy logic — chasing scale, acquisitions and market presence — instead of building strategy around what a cooperative is uniquely positioned to do.

Assume you are a strategy advisor brought in to the Co-op in 2005, before the Britannia merger and the Verde pursuit. Using only non-competitive strategy tools — scenario planning, category design, mission integrity analysis, and long-horizon thinking — build the outline of the strategic conversation the Co-op’s leadership should have been having. What questions should have been on the table? What 20-year opportunity was sitting unclaimed? What slow-moving threats should have been named? What would a purpose-first Co-op strategy for 2005–2030 have looked like?

Prompt 3: Design a Purpose-First Strategy Retreat

For the reader who is planning — or dreading — their next strategic planning offsite.

I need to design a two-day strategy retreat for the leadership team of a [describe your organisation type and size]. Our previous retreats have used standard frameworks — SWOT analysis, competitive positioning, priority matrices — and the resulting plans have consistently ended up on shelves.

The core problem is that those frameworks were designed for profit-first, competitor-facing businesses. We are a mission-first organisation with a long time horizon and no direct rival whose defeat would constitute success.

Design a full two-day retreat agenda that replaces competitive frameworks with purpose-built alternatives. Include: the opening question that reframes the entire conversation; how to run a scenario planning session for a non-technical audience; how to do backward mapping from a 25-year horizon to a 90-day action plan; and how to end the retreat with commitments that will actually survive contact with the following Monday morning.

Prompt 4: Make the Internal Case for Long-Term Thinking

For the reader who agrees with the argument but now has to convince a board or senior team that doesn’t.

I have read an argument that mission-driven organisations — cooperatives, government agencies, NGOs, religious institutions, family businesses — are systematically underserved by MBA-derived strategy frameworks because those frameworks were built for competitive, profit-first firms. I agree with this argument. My organisation is [describe it briefly].

The problem is that my board and senior leadership are not yet convinced. Several members have strong private-sector or MBA backgrounds and default to competitive strategy language. Others simply don’t see the urgency of changing our planning approach.

Help me build the internal case. Give me: three concrete examples of organisations like ours that failed — or significantly underperformed — because they used competitive strategy frameworks that didn’t fit; three compelling questions I can put to the board that will expose the mismatch without triggering defensiveness; and the single most persuasive one-paragraph argument I can make for why this matters now, not eventually.

Prompt 5: Apply Category Design to a Non-Competitive Organisation

For the reader intrigued by the article’s reference to category design as an alternative strategic tool.

Category design is a strategy framework developed primarily for technology and consumer companies. Its core idea is that instead of competing within an existing market, an organisation defines and dominates an entirely new category — changing what problem it is seen to solve and becoming the obvious answer to a question that previously wasn’t being asked.

I want to explore whether category design can be applied to a non-competitive organisation. My organisation is [describe: sector, size, core mission, approximate age, geographic context].

Walk me through a category design thinking process adapted for a mission-first organisation. Specifically: What category does my organisation currently occupy in the minds of the people it serves — and is that the right one? What problem could we redefine ourselves as the unique solution to? What would it mean for us to own a category rather than compete within one? And what is the 10-year version of success if we got this right?

A note on how to use these prompts: each one is a starting point, not a single exchange. The most productive approach is to begin the conversation, push back on the AI’s first response, add specifics about your own organisation, and treat the output as a thinking partner rather than a finished answer. Prompt 3 in particular benefits from iteration — run it once, then ask the AI to make the agenda harder, more honest, or more specific to your sector.