Navigating the internal politics of strategy

Strategy is never only a problem of logic.

At its heart, strategy is an intense internal power struggle masquerading behind words and numbers on a spreadsheet.

Most organisations treat the strategy process as if it were a simple, clean act of analysis: market data in, optimal choices out.

But because strategy is about making choices under conditions of uncertainty and constraint, these choices are actually shaped by prevailing narratives, hidden assumptions, institutional incentives and the personal interests of those who get to define what counts as 'rational' in the first place.

This is the hidden politics of strategy.

Who gets to name reality, whose risks are legitimate, whose future is treated as credible and whose trade-offs are quietly pushed aside and ignored.

A number of obvious things sit at the core of why this is.

First, visibility is political. What is deemed to be visible and thinkable is often just what the dominant narrative has conditioned us to notice, while the less visible parts of the system carry enormous value beneath the surface. In strategy terms, this means the loudest metrics, the most familiar competitors and the most culturally-acceptable definitions of success tend to crowd out weaker signals, peripheral stakeholders and emerging alternatives. The strategy scope acts a bit like a spotlight, illuminating some actors, but leaving lots of others in the shadows.

Second, resource allocations are power dynamics that are made to look neutral. When an organisation simply accepts an “unquestioned mandate to produce profits at all costs,” it doesn't just do so for the sake of optimisation; it chooses a political position about what matters and who matters. Often simply chasing margins, or justifying the continuation of the present because of sunk costs, can decimate the emergence of preferable futures, while dashboards often miss what most needs to be seen. Every budget is a ballot. Every KPI is a tiny constitution. Every operating model is an argument about what kind of future is tacitly allowed to arrive.

Third, the dominant story inside the organisation often becomes more real than reality itself. An overly simplified interpretation of the reality the business faces becomes accepted because people can no longer imagine alternatives. This is one of the most destructive political tactics in strategy. Teams keep using inherited categories, inherited planning cycles, inherited measures of success and then mistake institutional habit for objective truth. That is how stale organisational thinking persists long after the contextual operating environment has changed. The fiction survives because it is useful to those already arranged comfortably inside it.

Fourth, politics enters wherever legitimacy is contested. It's critical to ask the right questions of a system that is in desperate need of renewal: what entrenched biases are actively influencing perspectives, which other viewpoints are acknowledged, and from whose perspective is the information being presented? Whenever leadership says “the market wants this,” “customers don’t care,” or “the business case isn’t there,” it is worth asking: according to what evidence, interpreted by whom, through whose worldview, with which interests protected?

Fifth, trust has become strategic power. At this time of alarming synthetic persuasion, manipulation and brittle credibility, brands that can prove what is true gain loyalty, pricing power and regulator confidence. Politics in strategy today is not only of internal relevance, but is also about external legitimacy: regulators, employees, communities, customers and partners increasingly challenge the right of firms to operate in certain ways. Strategy can no longer be merely extractive and then wrapped in fluffy communication afterward, it must anticipate moral expectation and serve the greater good.

So what should a leader do?

Think about strategy less like creating a map and more like a 'bosberaad' of competing futures. Ask not only “What wins?”, but also:
- Who benefits from this framing?
- What alternatives have been rendered invisible?
- Which stakeholder has no real seat at the table?
- What are we calling efficiency that others would call erosion?
- Which decisions are genuinely analytical and which are downstream of power we have not named?

The job here is not to eliminate politics, but to rather to expect it, surface it early, handle it honestly and purposely design the practice of strategy for better critical thinking.

That means widening participation in the strategy process without losing sharpness. Slowing down some decisions for sense-making instead of rewarding misleading certainty. Building “credibility infrastructure” around claims, data and accountability. Actively and purposely scanning for the ideas, actors and 'edge conditions' that the dominant system narrative is incentivised to overlook.

The politics of strategy is the struggle over whose imagination becomes policy.

And the best strategists are not the ones who pretend to float above politics, they're are the ones who can read the room, read the system, read the future, figure out what's really going on...and then widen the thinking field so that better futures have a fighting chance of being chosen.