Your organization has a strategic plan. It probably took months to produce. It involved offsites, consultants, executive workshops, and a final document with enough weight to stop a door.
And right now, somewhere between "bold strategic direction" and "what people actually do on Tuesday morning," that plan is quietly failing.
Not because it was bad. Not because people aren't trying. But because a plan is a snapshot, and your organization is a living system operating in an environment that doesn't wait for your annual review cycle.
There's a better way to think about this. It starts with four questions.
The Napkin Version
Imagine drawing four circles on a napkin, each one feeding into the next, the last one looping back to the first. Around each circle, write one question:
- Are we doing the right things?
- Are we doing them the right way?
- Are we getting them done well?
- Are we getting the benefits?
That's it. Four questions. They sound simple. In practice, most leadership teams can't answer even one of them with evidence.
These questions come from a governance framework called the "Four Ares," originally articulated by John Thorp in The Information Paradox. They form the backbone of what we call the Design4 Framework: a continuous cycle that replaces linear strategic planning with something that actually works.
The Four Phases
Each question maps to a design phase. Together, the four phases create a cycle that keeps your organization aligned from purpose through to operations.
Discover: Are we getting the benefits?
This is where the cycle begins and where it returns. Discover anchors your organization in its authentic purpose and maps the stakeholder ecosystem before you attempt to solve problems or make plans.
It asks the questions most organizations skip: Why do we exist? Who are our stakeholders, really? What do they genuinely need from us? What forces in the environment shape what's possible?
These aren't philosophical exercises. They're the foundation for every strategic choice that follows. Without them, you end up with fifty ideas on a whiteboard and no way to choose among them.
The governance question here ("Are we getting the benefits?") seems counterintuitive for a phase about purpose. But benefits are the evidence that purpose is being fulfilled. If you can't demonstrate that stakeholders are receiving the value your organization exists to create, something upstream is broken. Discover is where you go to find out what.
Define: Are we doing the right things?
Define translates purpose into choices. Not aspirations. Not vision statements. Choices.
Strategy isn't a list of everything your organization could pursue. It's a deliberate narrowing. A decision about what to focus on and, just as importantly, what to set aside. The organizations that struggle most are the ones that refuse to choose. They fund every proposal, launch every initiative, and wonder why nothing gets the sustained attention it needs to succeed.
Define produces a strategic logic that can be tested: if we focus here, with these capabilities, we should win because of these advantages. This logic becomes the basis for everything that follows.
Develop: Are we doing them the right way?
Develop is the bridge between strategic ambition and organizational reality. It asks: given our strategic choices, what must we be great at? What capabilities do we need, and which ones are we missing?
This is where most strategies quietly die. The plan calls for digital transformation, but the IT infrastructure is legacy. The strategy assumes a new market, but the sales capability doesn't exist. Leaders commit to outcomes that require capabilities nobody has assessed, let alone built.
Capabilities aren't apps you download. They're integrated systems of people, processes, technology, and knowledge. They take time to develop. Develop is the discipline of honestly assessing what you have, what you need, and what it will take to close the gap.
Deliver: Are we getting them done well?
Deliver is where architecture meets the stakeholder's actual experience. It translates capability designs into the day-to-day systems through which your organization creates value.
The critical shift here is from internal efficiency to stakeholder value. It's not enough to have efficient operations. Those operations must reliably deliver the outcomes that stakeholders need. That means designing services from the outside in (starting with what the stakeholder experiences, not what the org chart dictates), establishing governance that monitors outcomes rather than just activity, and building feedback loops that detect drift before it becomes a crisis.
Why a Cycle, Not a Plan
Here's what makes this different from strategic planning: these four phases aren't sequential steps you complete and leave behind. They're interconnected gears. When one moves, it drives the others.
A discovery about shifting stakeholder expectations forces a reassessment of strategic choices. A capability gap revealed during development may require adjustments to the operating model. A performance shortfall in delivery triggers new questions about whether the organization is still anchored in the right purpose.
Traditional planning works like this:
Plan → Execute → Review (annually) → Start over
The Design4 cycle works like this:
Discover → Define → Develop → Deliver → Discover → ...
The first pass takes the most energy. But each subsequent cycle builds on what came before. Purpose becomes clearer. Strategic choices become sharper. Capabilities become more targeted. Operations become more responsive. The organization doesn't just get better at the work. It gets better at getting better.
This is what separates organizations that survive disruption from those that are destroyed by it. Not a better plan. A better way of thinking.
The Most Dangerous Answer
When you ask the Four Ares in your organization, you'll hear one answer more than any other: "We think so, but we don't have evidence."
That's the most dangerous answer, because it feels like alignment while masking the opposite. Governance without evidence is just opinion. And organizational opinions tend to be optimistic.
Here's a quick diagnostic. For each question, ask whether your organization can answer with evidence, not conviction:
| Question | Evidence looks like... | |----------|----------------------| | Are we doing the right things? | Strategic choices that explicitly flow from a stated purpose, with documented trade-offs | | Are we doing them the right way? | Capability assessments that show current vs. required maturity, with investment priorities tied to strategy | | Are we getting them done well? | Outcome metrics (not just activity metrics) that track stakeholder experience | | Are we getting the benefits? | Demonstrable stakeholder impact: are the people you exist to serve actually better off? |
If any row produces an uncomfortable silence, you've found where your execution breaks down. Not in effort or intention, but in the connection between what you intend and what you deliver.
Where to Start
You don't build all four phases at once. You start where the pain is.
If your dashboards are green while your stakeholders are disengaged, start with Discover. Your operations have drifted from your purpose, and you need to reconnect with why you exist.
If your vision inspires but nothing changes, start with Define. You have purpose without choices, and every initiative competes equally for attention.
If your strategy is clear but you keep under-delivering, start with Develop. You're making commitments your capabilities can't support.
If your capabilities exist but stakeholders don't experience the value, start with Deliver. You've built the engine but haven't designed the experience of being a passenger.
The framework meets you where you are. The questions tell you where to look.
This post is drawn from Closing the Strategy-Execution Gap, a self-paced course that follows one institution through all four phases and shows how the Design4 Framework works in practice.