The Heavy Lifting: Why Strategic Clarity Emerges from Shared Beliefs

In a recent strategy session with a high-growth technology company, we watched their leadership team struggle with five potential strategic moves. They'd been debating these options for months, going around in circles. But after spending a day establishing their shared beliefs about how their market would evolve, the path forward became surprisingly clear.

This experience crystallised something we observed over twenty-five years of strategy work: the hardest part of strategy isn't choosing between options - it's establishing the foundational beliefs that make those choices clear.

This insight parallels a fundamental principle in philosophical logic. In deductive reasoning, as philosopher Greg Ganssle notes, it's the premises, not the conclusion, that require the heavy lifting. Once you've established sound premises, the conclusion follows naturally.

The same holds true for strategy.

When leadership teams struggle to agree on strategic direction, we often rush to debate conclusions: Which market should we enter? What capabilities should we build? How should we compete? But these debates usually mask a deeper issue: the team hasn't done the heavy lifting of establishing shared beliefs about their competitive environment.

Recently, working with a leadership team, we spent the better part of a day on what might seem like a simple task: documenting their beliefs about how their market would evolve over the next three to five years. What trends were certain? Which were probable but uncertain? What would customers demand? How would technology change? What would competitors do?

This wasn't easy work. It required structured dialogue, rigorous questioning, and a willingness to examine assumptions. We had to strip away rhetoric, challenge conventional wisdom, and get to clear statements that everyone could understand and evaluate.

But something remarkable happened. Once the team established their shared beliefs about the future, their strategic choices became almost obvious. Just as in deductive reasoning, where valid conclusions flow naturally from sound premises, strategic clarity emerged from shared understanding.

This isn't coincidence. Strategy is fundamentally about making choices in uncertainty. But we can only make good choices when we're clear about what we believe to be true about our environment. Without this foundation, strategic debates become exercises in competing opinions rather than logical reasoning from shared premises.

This has profound implications for how we should approach strategy:

1. Focus first on establishing shared beliefs about your competitive environment

2. Do the heavy lifting of testing these beliefs through structured dialogue

3. Document these beliefs explicitly - they're the premises for your strategic reasoning

4. Only then move to strategic choices, which should flow naturally from these shared beliefs

Too often, we do this backwards. We jump to strategic options before establishing the foundational beliefs that would make those choices clear. It's like trying to construct a proof without first establishing our premises.

This doesn't mean strategy is purely deductive. Markets are complex, and perfect certainty is impossible. But by doing the heavy lifting of establishing shared beliefs first, we create a foundation for strategic clarity.

For leadership teams, this means resisting the urge to jump to conclusions. Instead, invest time in the harder work of surfacing, testing, and agreeing on foundational beliefs about your competitive environment. While this might feel slow initially, it actually accelerates decision-making by creating the conditions for genuine strategic clarity.

As we witnessed in this example, when teams do this heavy lifting, strategic choices that seemed complex can become surprisingly clear. Just as in logic, sound premises lead naturally to valid conclusions.

The next time your team struggles with strategic choices, step back and ask: Have we done the heavy lifting of establishing our shared beliefs? The clarity you seek might emerge naturally once you do.