I was sitting in on a strategy offsite a few years ago—the kind that runs for two days, produces a thick deck and leaves everyone feeling something important had happened.

On the second afternoon, the CEO stood up and walked the room through the three strategic priorities for the next eighteen months. It was a good presentation with clear slides, solid logic and a few memorable phrases. Someone remarked that it was the most aligned the leadership team had felt in years.

Six weeks later, I met one of the business unit heads for coffee.

I asked how the strategy was going.

She paused.

"Which part? We have so many initiatives running right now."

I asked her to tell me the three strategic priorities from the offsite.

She named two. The third she described in a way that was almost the opposite of what had been agreed.

Its goal is better decisions, not just better understanding.  Every day, people across the organisation make judgment calls: what to prioritise, which trade-offs to accept, which opportunities to pursue and which to let pass. If the strategy isn't shaping those choices, it isn't doing much work.

This is where many organisations stumble. What gets communicated is usually the plan: the initiatives, milestones and deliverables. Those matter, but they aren't the strategy.

A strategy explains why those choices—and not the obvious alternatives—should produce a better outcome.

Why are we investing here and not there? What are we betting will be true? What opportunities are we deliberately walking away from?

If people can't answer those questions, they may execute the plan faithfully while making hundreds of perfectly sensible decisions that gradually pull the organisation away from the strategy.

This is the position many strategy and operations leaders find themselves in. They didn't create the strategy. They're responsible for helping everyone else use it.

That's harder than it sounds.

The version of the strategy that makes sense at the top doesn't automatically arrive intact three levels down. Somewhere along the way, the logic becomes a list of initiatives.

The real test before any strategy communication is this: Can the person who just heard this use it to make a decision I haven't anticipated?

And not  "Have I made this clear?"

The goal isn't for people to remember what the organisation is going to do. It's for them to understand why those choices make sense, and to use that logic when nobody senior is in the room.

After your next strategy communication—a town hall, a team briefing or a stakeholder update—ask one person, informally, to explain the strategy back to you in their own words. Not as a test. As a genuine question.

Listen for what they describe.

If they tell you what the team is going to do, you've communicated a plan.

If they can explain why those choices were made over others, you've communicated a strategy.

Then ask them about a decision they made recently. Did the strategy influence it? If not, you've found the gap.

Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, makes a crisp nine-minute distinction between strategic planning and strategy. Watch for one idea in particular: plans describe actions you control; strategy explains why those actions should produce the outcome you want. Once you see that difference, you'll never read a strategy deck the same way again.

In Korean, nunchi (눈치) describes the ability to read a room—to sense what others are thinking and feeling without being told. Literally translated as "eye-measure," it is the ability to notice what remains unspoken: hesitation beneath agreement, uncertainty behind confidence, questions nobody has voiced. In Korea it is considered a practical skill, cultivated deliberately and quickly missed when absent. More on nunchi here from The Guardian >>