Avoid using too many words

'The purpose of a system is what it does.' - Stafford Beer

When it comes to creating and crafting statements that are a part of a strategy process, fewer words are far better than long, lofty statements.

Fewer words are better because the purpose of strategy (presumably) is to affect the behaviour and the output of a business (a complex, adaptive system) - not to (presumably) just produce a nice document with pleasing sounding statements that then get filed away and ignored.

If you are intending to shift what a business does from 'where it is' to 'where it should / could be' then it is very important to get extremely clear as to what the ideal future-state is and where the gaps are between that and the present-state.

Fluffy words have no place in this process and in fact a large part of good strategy facilitation is calming the desire of teams to add fluff and irrelevant length into the process.

What you want from strategy is a focused lens that guides action; a set of thoroughly considered words that act like a razor-sharp axe, allowing decision-makers to chop away at excess to hone in on options that take the business towards the ideal future-state.

In driving a complex system towards consistently delivering outputs that you want, less is more. But make no mistake - getting things down to less is incredibly difficult and time-consuming. Once you get to the kernel of your approach, you then need to actively use it day-in-and-day-out to see what results it actually produces and then adjust it if necessary. Outputs become inputs into the system and management measures and adjusts.