Why So Many of Us Hate Creating Strategies…and how the MVP mindset trained us to skip the “boring” bit

Launching campaigns is fun. Strategy is not.

One gives you immediate dopamine kicks in revenue and engagement; the other challenges you with a blank page, critical thinking, hard choices, and the risk of being wrong in public before dopamine can even kickstart. As Jack Welch once said: "In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell."

So most teams “test, learn, scale” their way forward for that immediate kick; often without ever writing down what they’re actually trying to win at.

It’s a strange paradox: everyone agrees that strategy matters, yet most of us avoid doing it. Strategy demands trade-offs. It forces you to commit to one path and close the door on others. It exposes you to the uncomfortable question: “If this is our plan, what happens if it fails?”

On discovery calls, we experience this tension play out again and again. Prospective clients often tell us they’ve “already built a strategy.” But when we look under the hood, it turns out to be little more than a plan of activities. Run ads here, test a new channel there, optimize spend. When we ask the obvious follow-up:“What was the hypothesis behind this plan?” the best answer we usually hear is: “10x ROI or ROAS.” (Oh please, tell me more…)

Great. But that’s not a strategy. That’s an outcome target, sprinkled with wishful thinking.

As Michael Porter famously put it: "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." Strategy is not a wish for returns; it's a set of choices about where to play, how to win, and what capabilities are required to make it real. A spreadsheet of activities, without a hypothesis, is just motion. Roger Martin; author of Playing to Win : How Strategy Really Works, adds another layer: "Strategy is not a long planning document; it is a set of interrelated and powerful choices that positions the organization to win." And perhaps more pointedly: "Most strategies fail because they are actually goals. 'We want to be number one' is not a strategy. It's a goal. Strategy is the method by which you achieve the goal." Follow Roger Martin on Medium (strongly recommended).

So how did we get here?
Part of the blame lies in the rise of the MVP mindset. Minimum viable products and rapid tests lowered the cost of being wrong. Instead of debating a plan, you could launch something small, see what happened, and learn from it. In principle, that’s healthy. In practice, it quietly replaced strategy-first experimentation with experimentation instead of strategy.

Eric Ries originally defined MVP as “that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” That’s a powerful concept—when done right. But here’s the catch: validated learning only exists if you’ve defined a hypothesis and the environment in which you’re testing it. Otherwise, an MVP is just a stunt.

Ries himself warned in the his book; The Lean Startup: “The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste.” That’s true, but marketing teams often hear it as permission to “launch and see whether the noodle sticks,” without ever deciding what learning would count. Running tests is good for learning, but not if the variables are undefined, the criteria are missing, and the hypothesis never existed in the first place. Think about it, how do scientists get to their results and discoveries?!

The consequences are well documented. Harvard Business Review's research on experimentation shows that companies like Booking.com run over 25,000 tests annually, but the key to their success isn't the volume—it's that each test has a clear hypothesis tied to strategic objectives. Most teams fail to specify what would count as a feasible answer, so results rarely change decisions.

The Startup Genome study of 3,200+ startups reached the same conclusion: premature scaling—building fast without clear strategic choices—was the #1 cause of failure, affecting 74% of high-growth internet startups.

The lesson is simple: discovery without direction burns time, money, and morale. Allow me to build an Eselsbrücke (analogy, I really like making analogies). Think about how you plan your holidays: you choose a date, duration, and destination; you evaluate transport options (comfort vs. cost vs. speed); you decide what to pack. Each of these steps is driven by small hypotheses about what will make the trip work, and what not. Strategy is the same. It’s not a list of activities — it’s the choices and assumptions that guide everything else.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

The act of making strategic choices, even if they need adjustment later, is what creates clarity. Of course, experimentation has its place. A well-crafted MVP can be cheaper per attempt and faster to market than a grand plan. But experiments only become efficient when they are tethered to a theory of how you’ll win. Otherwise, you end up A/B-testing your way to nowhere, mistaking motion for progress.

"All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved."
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Roger Martin offers a different starting point: “Start by deeply understanding the choices that have produced the most painful gaps between what we wish was happening and what is happening.” Strategy isn’t about predicting the future with certainty; it’s about naming your choices, then testing whether the world supports them.

At ADER Edge, we like this part. We like the dirty work—the research, the probing questions, the uncomfortable silences when a plan is revealed to be activity without purpose. (But we don't judge) Because strategy isn’t about avoiding failure. It’s about failing at the right things, for the right reasons, on the way to a clear and defensible win.

Most teams don’t enjoy that process. Luckily, we do.

P.s. ROI doesn't start with "launch," it starts with choices.