Digital Economy Dispatch #269 -- Why Strategy is Not Just Delivery

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a heated discussion with a group of senior executives about AI adoption. The conversation had turned to how organisations were approaching their AI strategies, and someone quoted the familiar mantra: "The strategy is delivery." Heads nodded around the table. It was a phrase everyone knew. A rallying cry that had become gospel in digital transformation circles.

I pushed back. Hard.

Don't get me wrong. I have enormous respect for the work that Mike Bracken and his colleagues did at the Government Digital Service, and for the ideas captured in their book "Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy is Delivery” – a well-thumbed copy sits in front of me as I type. Their emphasis on agility, user focus, and iterative improvement was exactly what government IT needed in 2011. After decades of bloated contracts, failed mega-projects, and technology decisions made far from the people using the services, the message was timely and necessary.

But a rallying cry is not a complete philosophy. In the years since, "strategy is delivery" has been stretched beyond its original intent, becoming too often an excuse to avoid the difficult work of rolling up the sleeves to fix what’s broken, taking ownership of hard decisions, and engaging in genuine strategic thinking.

The Seductive Simplicity of "Just Do It"

The appeal of "strategy is delivery" is obvious. It cuts through bureaucratic paralysis. It demands action over endless planning cycles. It puts user needs at the centre.

These are good things. Especially in environments where strategy had become synonymous with lengthy documents gathering dust while the world moved on. GOV.UK remains an important example of what focused delivery can achieve.

But somewhere along the way, the message mutated. "Strategy is delivery" became "strategy is only delivery." The implicit claim shifted from "stop hiding behind strategy" to "strategic thinking is unnecessary overhead”. And that's where we've gone badly wrong.

What Strategy Actually Requires

Real strategy is not a document. But it's not something that emerges automatically from iterative delivery. Strategy requires things that cannot be invented on the fly:

• Deep analysis. Understanding your competitive landscape, your capabilities, your constraints, and the forces shaping your environment takes time and rigorous thinking. You cannot sprint your way to insight about deep issues such as geopolitical shifts in technology supply chains, the changing economics of AI infrastructure, or the regulatory pressures that will shape your operating context for the next decade.

• Negotiation and agreement. Strategy in any organisation of scale is not the vision of a single leader. It emerges from difficult conversations, competing priorities, and hard-won consensus. These negotiations take time. They require building relationships, understanding different perspectives, and finding genuine alignment. They are not just superficial agreement in a sprint retrospective.

• Judgement born of experience. The wisdom comes from knowing which opportunities to pursue and which to decline, when to move fast and when to exercise caution, and what to build and what to buy. These judgements cannot be learned in a two-week iteration. They come from years of accumulated experience, from having seen what works and what fails, from understanding not just the technical possibilities but the human and organisational realities.

•  Governance and accountability. Strategic decisions have long-term consequences. They commit resources, foreclose alternatives, and shape organisational direction for years. Such choices require proper governance with clear accountability, appropriate oversight, and mechanisms for course correction. Agile ceremonies are not a substitute for board-level strategic governance.

The AI Amplifier

This matters more than ever in the age of AI. The technology decisions organisations make today will shape their capabilities, costs, risks, and competitive position for years to come. Consider just a few of the strategic questions that cannot be answered by delivery alone:

How much of your AI capability should be built versus bought? What are the long-term implications of dependency on a small number of foundation model providers? How do you balance the productivity benefits of AI against workforce implications? What data governance frameworks need to be in place before you scale? How do you position yourself given the uncertainty about AI regulation across different jurisdictions?

These are not questions you can A/B test your way through. They require strategic thinking by applying analysis, judgement, and governance that operates on a different timescale than sprint cycles.

The irony is that the very organisations that pioneered "strategy is delivery" are now grappling with the consequences. The recent UK government review of digital services found that digital strategies too often set out ambitious visions while failing to put in place the performance targets, funding, tools and systems required to deliver them. The problem wasn't wasting time on too much strategy: it was strategy disconnected from the hard work of implementation planning and resource commitment.

Finding the Balance

None of this is an argument for returning to the bad old days of strategy as a substitute for action. The pendulum doesn't need to swing back to endless planning cycles and analysis paralysis. But neither should we pretend that strategy emerges spontaneously from rapid iteration.

The most effective organisations I work with have learned to hold both truths simultaneously. They maintain a clear strategic direction, grounded in deep analysis, properly governed, and built on experienced judgement, while executing with agility and responsiveness to what they learn along the way. They understand that Mintzberg was right: realised strategy is always a combination of the deliberate and the emergent. But they also understand that without the deliberate, the emergent is just drift.

Strategy is not just delivery. Strategy enables delivery. Strategy gives delivery direction, purpose, and coherence. Without a strategy, delivery becomes an activity without achievement, in danger of being activity without progress.

In a world being reshaped by AI, we need both. We need the courage to act and the wisdom to think. We need sprint velocity and strategic patience. We need teams empowered to deliver and leaders capable of genuine strategic thought.

The organisations that will thrive are those that resist the false choice. They will be neither paralysed by planning nor lost in tactical busyness. They will deliver with purpose, but guided by a strategy that deserves the name.