Strategies that Stick: Crafting Practical and Enduring Success

Michael Carter, Efram Lebovits, Peter Bowman — February 20, 2025

In a dynamic business world, creating and executing an enduring strategy that delivers results is a tough nut to crack. Despite the best efforts and significant resources, many strategies fall short. This white paper explores the elements that make strategies stick and highlights the key principles we’ve found essential for crafting a strategy that successfully delivers sustainable outcomes.

Most Strategies Ultimately Fail

Taken as a whole, many strategies miss the mark. Our research shows that up to 82% of strategies don’t achieve their intended goals. Why this happens is typically attributed to reasons ranging from lack of alignment and poor execution to resistance to change and communication breakdowns. Rarely, however, does the strategy itself or the process that led to its creation share any blame when organizations struggle to deliver. Crafting a good strategy is difficult, and many organizations struggle to make difficult strategic choices.

How to Build a Strategy That Sticks

There’s no one-size-fits-all. A good strategy fits your organization’s unique context, considering your culture, market dynamics, competitive landscape, and internal capabilities and gaps. Building a strategy that considers these factors is the difference between a strategy that has the potential to stick and one that does not. Over our two-plus decades of supporting clients across sectors, we’ve honed our approach to strategy development, blending a unique process and differentiated style that yields results that endure the test of time. Our approach (a combination of specific process and style elements) is rooted in years of fine tuning and we hope by sharing this it helps others as they navigate successful strategy development and execution.

Level5’s approach to building a strategy that sticks

Process

Data-Driven

Brand and Customer Informed

Engage and Align

Define Clear Actions & Ownership

Embed Success Metrics

Style

Work With You, Not To You

Empathetic

Constructively Challenge

Adaptive

Pragmatic

Process

Data Driven: We help teams make decisions based on data-driven insight, not just what people think or feel. Strategy comes down to making the right, at times difficult, decisions that will achieve your organization’s objectives. It is vitally important to start every strategic exercise by building a foundation of facts, insight, and implications that are used to make choices that will get at the heart of what your business is trying to achieve. Data itself can be extracted from numerous sources. Surveys, historical performance, and market research to name a few, can be used to align team members on the facts that must be considered when developing strategy.

A common pitfall we actively guard against when developing strategy is that organizations either gather too much data to the point where analysis paralysis sets in; or, there is no data at all and they plan to develop a strategy through opinion and conjecture. Creating the data-driven foundation is a balancing act that, when done correctly, leads to informed, forward-looking strategic choices.

Brand and Customer Informed: We build strategy from the outside-in to ensure it will help you keep your promise to key audiences. The best strategies are able to align what your organization uniquely offers (the brand) with what customers are looking for. This means understanding your brand’s unique value proposition and how to consistently deliver it while aligning with customer needs and expectations.

By missing these important ingredients in strategy development, we have seen organizations accidentally lose what makes them stand out, turning to purely opportunistic choices that could be at odds with who they are. A brand is more than just a trademark, it’s an asset that can generate value for the business and sustain progress through difficult times – and must be part of any strategy’s DNA.

Engage and Align: We embrace a change orientation to build your team’s understanding and commitment. By involving team members at all levels, we foster a sense of ownership and alignment. This collaborative approach helps clients achieve greater buy-in and smoother implementation.

Nobody likes being told to deliver a strategy someone else created; and yet many organizations create this situation by crafting strategies behind closed doors amongst a chosen few. Engaging team members is a balance, inviting everyone to every meeting is unrealistic, but involving people through listening tours, focus groups, interviews, and townhalls are tools we have found useful for engaging folks early and making them invested in the organization’s future.

Define Clear Actions & Ownership: We engage with multiple levels of the organization and define clear accountabilities to build commitment and propel execution. A strategy without action is just a well-crafted story. Prioritizing clear actions and owners is crucial for ensuring that your team can properly deliver the strategy’s vision.

A phrase we sometimes use to capture the essence of this is ’Bias for Action’; it implies a behaviour where people don’t wait for the perfect answer – they instead try, test, and learn, to create a solution that works. We have found that the best strategies constantly, and explicitly, map out the actions that the organization will take as a result – the plan itself is only the first step to making it stick.

Embed Success Metrics: We align teams to clear goals and outcomes to drive focus and measurable impact. By setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals, we ensure that your progress can be tracked and success can be quantified.

Every organization can think of examples where they had a logically sound strategy, choice, or action but never identified how to monitor its success. Ensuring metrics are part of the strategy creates a platform for both seeing whether the strategy is on track and also allowing organizations to celebrate their success. Metrics are not just a necessary step to measuring the strategy’s delivery, they serve as a tool to motivate and engage staff as they work together to deliver.

Principles in Action

These principles came to life clearly with a recent client operating in the grocery retail space. This client was looking for a strategy to evolve their retail locations in light of recent innovations. For the purpose of this deep dive, the journey was as important as the output. The core of the project focused on a series of successive workshops where a cross-section of client leaders came together to define what the organization was trying to deliver.

Before going into strategy development, we started by conducting a market assessment to gather data that could actively challenge and shape the team’s understanding of how other organizations tackled the same problem. We visited competitor stores and invited suppliers to provide presentations on what they were seeing in the market. We supplemented this data with market research to explore recent category trends so that we could drive an informed discussion.

When we kicked off the workshop series, we started by having each client introduce themselves, not by title but by what topics they were excited to explore. By starting this way, the clients were not anchoring themselves in their existing hierarchy but instead by what motivates them in the business. This fostered an open conversation where it wasn’t about “what does the boss want” but instead “what does our business need”.

Many organizations create strategies amongst executives and hold it in relative secrecy until it is ‘ready to implement’. That was not the case in this engagement. From the outset we involved a variety of stakeholders, at different levels to participate in our meetings and workshops so that the change management could begin early, and people felt heard.

The workshops themselves were structured such that the client team was running their own breakout rooms to facilitate great conversations. The roles were structured such that we (the consultants) were participants just as much as the client – we were part of the team.

A true bright spot for this project was that we didn’t wait until the project was done to start testing and implementing the ideas we were outlining. An early expectation from each workshop was that team members had ‘homework’. After each session the team would take one or two learnings from the workshop and go and apply them to their department. This meant that we were constantly testing and learning from each conversation so that the decisions in the final strategy were proven and pragmatic.

Style

Work With You, Not To You: We believe in the power of collaboration and co-development. By working closely with your team, we ensure that strategies are tailored to your unique needs, making them more widely embraced which supports implementation. Clients benefit from a more personalized and collaborative approach that fosters stronger partnerships and better outcomes.

Collaboration is key. Completely outsourcing strategy is a surefire way to limit a team’s effectiveness in delivering it. Many organizations engage partners to help them craft a strategy, the nature of this relationship is as important as the partner’s capabilities. Time and time again we find that taking a true partnership approach, can be a difference-maker when engaging a third party to create a strategy that sticks.
Empathetic: We listen to get a deep understanding of your needs and opportunities, perspectives, and motivations. Understanding different perspectives is powerful. Our ability to empathize with your teams and stakeholders, depends on our ability to understand them. Only when we understand their motivations, their concerns, and their priorities does it become possible to shape a strategy that everyone can fully buy into. In essence, we focus on the human side of strategy development.

It’s fairly common to see organization’s struggle with an internal ‘us versus them’ mentality which can quickly derail a strategy that is meant to unite. Managing these internal frictions typically comes down to spending the time to clearly understand, present, and at times even document the importance of each group within the business. When people understand the value their colleagues deliver, they can begin to trust and communicate more openly, laying the foundation for an effective strategy.
Constructively Challenge: We challenge the status-quo and push your team to think differently. By asking tough questions and encouraging innovative thinking, we help you uncover new opportunities and solutions.

Doing this comes down to asking great questions before finding great answers. When organization’s start looking at strategy as the answer to a series of questions – questions of risk, questions of trends, questions of opportunities, questions of what is possible – they can more easily reduce the influence that potentially misleading ‘golden truths’ hold over the organization.

Adaptive: One size doesn’t fit all. We recognize your business and challenges are unique. A strategy needs to support who you are as an organization. Rigid strategies often fail when faced with unexpected challenges. Successful strategies are those that evolve and adapt to your organization’s needs and environment.

Adapting to needs comes down to understanding what matters most to all stakeholders involved. No two organizations are the same, despite what an initial glance may suggest. Organizations that account for their own unique personalities, capabilities, and context are the ones that can truly unite staff around a common vision.
Pragmatic: We ground ourselves in your business’ realities and what will actually work. It’s a balance of ambition with practicality. It’s important to set bold, yet achievable, goals. Your team will only be energized if they believe what they are building is possible – a stretch but still possible.

Organization’s that are able to make a strategy stick take the time to validate how feasible the vision really is. Again, this is where balance comes in. Focus exclusively on vague “moonshots” and organization’s will have something they cannot implement, focus too heavily on what they can currently deliver and your strategy will closely resemble your annual plan. Creating this balance comes down to the entire strategic exercise. Clarity on the end state makes it easier for organizations to align on what tangible steps need to be taken to get there.

Conclusion: The Strength of a Strategy That Sticks

These principles are not just theories—they are the proven difference-makers that have empowered countless organizations to achieve lasting success. Crafting a strategy that sticks is about more than setting goals; it’s about creating a dynamic vision that reflects your organization’s unique ambitions and challenges. It’s about building a plan that inspires action, unites your team, and delivers measurable results.

We understand that developing strategy isn’t always easy—it takes time, effort, and courage to address the tough questions. The investment you make today will determine whether your strategy propels your organization forward or falls short of its potential.

At Level5 Strategy, we don’t just help you develop strategies; we partner with you to bring them to life. We use these principles in every engagement, ensuring your organization has the tools and insights needed to turn strategy into lasting success. Your business deserves a strategy that sticks. If you’re ready to chart a bold path forward, we’d be honored to support you. Let’s explore how we can help you define and achieve a future that truly lasts.

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