Strategizing: The New Leadership Craft

Nick van Heck has sat inside executive rooms for more than thirty years.

Not as a consultant with a slide deck. As a witness to how real strategy actually gets made — and more often than most companies will admit, how it quietly gets undone.

He is about to launch a book on strategy that is, in a sense, a book about not writing a strategy at all. His thesis is simple and uncomfortable:

Strategy is dead. Strategizing is the new leadership craft.

The move from the noun to the verb is not cosmetic. It changes who does the work, how often, in what register, and against what quality standard. And once you see it, you cannot un-see it in your own boardroom.

This essay is Nick's thesis — in his own words, and against the backdrop of a conversation that got sharper than either of us expected.

Strategy was always a judgment call

Nick starts with something that has been true for decades but is now impossible to ignore.

Nobody can actually claim that he or she knows exactly how the future will enroll.

That has always been the case. What has changed is that the volume of available data has exploded, the pace of change has accelerated, and the executive illusion that more data will finally let us know has gotten stronger, not weaker.

With AI inside the enterprise, we now have more data in more places, available in more real-time, generated by more sources, than any board in history has ever worked with. And yet, Nick says, strategy has not become easier.

It should become easier. It is not becoming any easier because it is fundamentally about something everybody should start with — I don't know.

The honest I don't know is the opening move of the craft. The judgment call still has to be made. Data narrows the uncertainty. Data does not make the choice.

That choice is never going to be brought by data. It is ultimately a judgment call where we say we are going left and not going right.

If AI gives every competitor access to roughly the same data and roughly the same analysis, then the differentiator shifts. It stops being what you know. It becomes what you choose to do with what you know — and the quality of the conversation in which that choice gets made.

That is the opening of the craft.

From strategy to strategizing

The classical strategy process — the September offsite, the November write-up, the December board presentation, the budget attached, the slide deck filed — is not wrong. From a governance perspective it is essential. Rhythm matters.

But in a world where volatility has gone on steroids, that cycle alone can no longer carry the work.

Strategy is dead. Strategizing is the new strategy. The world is faster changing than you can recreate a strategy. It has become a continuous process.

The shift the next generation of executive teams has to make is this: strategy is a document you produce once a year. Strategizing is a craft you practise every time your leadership team is in a room together.

And the quality of that craft, Nick is clear, lives in one place:

The quality of those conversations will have a direct impact on the quality of what we are able to achieve.

Everything else in Nick's framework follows from this.

The three layers beneath every strategic conversation

Nick names three layers at work in every strategizing conversation. Most executive teams only pay attention to the first.

Layer one — the process. The offsite. The budget cycle. The board calendar. The deliverables. Nothing wrong with it. It is governance. But it is only the visible surface.

Layer two — the conversation dynamics. What actually gets said in those meetings. What gets heard. What gets pushed back on. What gets quietly ignored. Which voices lean in. Which voices lean out. Whose idea gets picked up. Whose idea gets forgotten in the same minute it was spoken.

Layer three — the personal and motivational state. With what spirit, mind, and personal history does each person walk into the room. The good, the bad, and the ugly of it. The injuries they are still protecting. The loyalties they have not yet named out loud.

The third layer is with what motivational state and what spirit I am walking into those interactions. The good, the bad and the ugly of it.

The uncomfortable truth: layer three silently drives layer two, and layer two silently drives layer one. If the deepest layer is distorted, the surface will be too — regardless of how disciplined the process is.

The craft of strategizing is the craft of reading and working all three layers at once.

The five practices behind the craft

Underneath the craft, Nick names five specific practices that every strategizing conversation should move through.

Seeing — what is actually on the field, before we jump to interpretation. The data, the signals, the small observations from the client interaction that will not reach the dashboard.

Exploring — what we think is going on, and why. Second and third interpretations before we commit to the first.

Choosing — the actual judgment call. What we are going to do, and what we are deliberately not going to do.

Activating — translating the choice into movement across the organisation.

Embedding — making sure the choice holds past the next quarterly surprise.

The one most often skipped, by far, is exploring.

I miss a lot of exploring. And a lot of consequential thinking — if we make that choice, what are the consequences of that?

Most executives have climbed the ranks on pattern recognition and fast execution. Problem spotted. Solution applied. Next slide. That reflex works brilliantly in operational contexts. It fails in strategic ones — because in a volatile, systemic environment, the first explanation is rarely the only one, and often not the most important one.

Fast execution without exploration is how companies miss the technology that is already being built on another continent. It is how two previous CEOs get hired for the same role against the same brief, and both exit within two years.

Exploring is where the craft actually gets expensive. Not in time. In the willingness to stay in the question longer than the room is comfortable with.

Persuasion bombing — the anti-craft

Somewhere in our conversation, Nick made an observation about recent research into how AI models behave. It is called persuasion bombing: once a model takes a position, it keeps persuading its interlocutor of that same position, even when challenged.

He laughed, carefully.

When I read that I said: well, this is where AI is becoming human.

Because that is what happens inside most executive rooms. Someone takes a position. The next person responds — not with a question, but with a counter-position. The ball goes back over the net. Precision. Force. Timing. The person with the strongest arm wins the point. The weaker arm backs off. The strategy is set.

Nick's reframe is simple and radical:

The missing ingredient is questions.

Why am I not raising a question? Where does that conviction actually come from? Or do we get into a tennis match of persuasion bombing?

A real strategizing conversation is not a tennis match. It is a widening of perspectives. Not everyone around the table needs to agree, but everyone around the table needs to have genuinely considered the alternatives before the final judgment call is made.

The question is the primary instrument of the craft. Curiosity is its posture. Or, as it came out of me during the conversation: curiosity kills the cat, but saves the board.

Where the craft meets human weight

The three layers and the five practices are the structure. The craft itself is harder than the structure makes it look — because the deepest layer carries human weight, and human weight includes two things most strategy books refuse to name: loyalty and friendship.

Nick is honest about this. He has fallen into the trap himself.

There is a trade-off. Is this the right moment for me to bring this up? Maybe I missed something, so I'll let it go — although I don't believe in it really.

That is the quiet mechanism. Over years of working together, trust is built. History is accumulated. One colleague gave another their first role. A board member championed the CEO's appointment. An executive owes their career trajectory to a mentor who is still in the room.

And then, one day, a strategizing conversation arrives where the honest observation — the one that would actually serve the organisation — would require that same person to challenge the vision of the one they are loyal to.

The observation stays in the throat.

Loyalty is a great thing, but it can get in the way of sharp choices, sharp observations, sharp decisions.

The paradox of friendship is this: the same quality that makes a team cohere is the quality that quietly keeps it from telling itself the truth when the strategy begins to drift.

Nick goes further. The same logic applies to commitment to the strategy itself.

When does commitment become stubbornness and blindness and throwing good money after bad money?

The same quality that keeps a team persisting through a difficult first year is the quality that keeps them persisting into a lost third year. The distinction between the two does not live in the strategy. It lives in the willingness of the room to re-read reality honestly, together.

Who cooked the breakfast?

Peter Drucker's line — culture eats strategy for breakfast — has become a slogan. Nick turned it around.

Who do you think cooked the breakfast in the first place? One of the chefs was the strategy process.

The culture of an executive team is not something that pre-exists its strategy process. It is being built, meeting by meeting, in how that strategy process actually gets conducted. What gets paid attention to. What gets ignored. What gets rewarded. What gets quietly punished. Who speaks. Who is heard. Whose idea gets attributed. Whose idea gets forgotten.

There is an important role for the CEO in how you build the strategizing capability and capacity in your organisation.

A CEO who does not explore does not get a team that explores. A CEO who treats dissent as disloyalty does not get a team that dissents when the strategy quietly starts to fail. A CEO who, in the thousand small gestures of a strategizing meeting, rewards fluency over curiosity, will build a culture in which the next hard question is already set up never to be asked.

The CEO is not the hero of the craft. The CEO is the chef of the breakfast that becomes the culture that eats everything else.

Three questions for your next boardroom

If this essay has resonated anywhere, these three questions may be worth taking into the next strategic conversation your team holds.

One — Where in our strategizing are we skipping the exploring?

Which first explanations have we accepted without ever surfacing a second or a third? Which patterns have we treated as self-evident because they match our instinct, not because we have interrogated them?

Two — Which conversation are we not having, and why not?

Is the thing nobody is saying driven by loyalty, by friendship, by career calculation, by respect for the room — or by the quiet decision that this is not the moment? And if not now, when?

Three — When does our commitment to this strategy need to be re-read, not re-defended?

What would a wide-angle, honest re-reading of the last three quarters tell us about whether this is persistence or stubbornness? And who in the room is best positioned to lead that re-reading?

These are not questions a leadership team answers once. They are questions the craft asks every time the room meets.

Toward a strategizing guild

At the end of our conversation, Nick named his bigger ambition.

I want to turn the strategizing craft into a guild — of people who keep looking for better ways to actually make that strategizing happen.

That framing — strategizing as a craft, carried by a guild — is one of the most hopeful things I have heard about the future of executive leadership in a long time. A craft is something you can get better at. A guild is a group of practitioners committed to that improvement, together, generation after generation.

If strategy was ever the preserve of specialists with slide decks, strategizing belongs to anyone willing to sit at an executive table and hold the quality of its conversation as part of their actual job.

At The Indigo Elephant, we are opening precisely those conversations with boards, CEOs, and executive teams who are ready to see strategizing not as a quarterly obligation but as the leadership craft of the next decade. Nick's book, when it lands, will be an essential text in that conversation. Many more will follow.

For now, there is a conversation to be had. Possibly with a colleague you trust. Possibly with a board you serve. Possibly with yourself, honestly, about the last meeting where fluency replaced curiosity, and the hard question stayed in the throat.

That is where the craft begins.

Frequently Asked

Nick van Heck is the founder of ELP, a strategy house working with executive teams and boards across Europe. His upcoming book turns three decades of boardroom observation into a usable framework for leaders who want strategy to be a craft, not a document.

Mario Haneca is Founding Partner at The Indigo Elephant, an advisory firm walking beside CEOs, boards, and founders building organisations worthy of what humanity is becoming. He hosts Insights, the firm's long-form conversation series with the leaders, founders, and thinkers shaping the next decade of executive craft.