Your organization wrote a strategic plan. It took months. Consultants were involved. The document was polished, presented, and approved.
Then the environment shifted. A regulation changed. A competitor moved. A funding model collapsed. A crisis hit. And the plan — the plan that assumed a world that no longer exists — kept running, because nobody built a mechanism for updating it.
This is the fundamental flaw of strategic planning as most organizations practice it: it treats strategy as an event. Something you do once, execute for three to five years, and then do again. Plan. Execute. Review. Repeat.
The problem isn't the plan. The problem is the gap between planning cycles. That's where the world changes and the organization doesn't.
Plans Are Snapshots. Organizations Are Living Systems.
A strategic plan captures what leadership believed to be true at a specific moment: who the stakeholders are, what the environment looks like, where the opportunities lie, what the organization is capable of. It's a snapshot.
But organizations don't operate in snapshots. They operate in continuous time, in environments that shift without waiting for your annual review cycle. Stakeholder expectations evolve. Technology changes what's possible. Competitors make moves you didn't anticipate. Governments announce funding with conditions that didn't exist when your plan was written.
If your strategy is a fixed plan, every one of these shifts creates a gap between what you intended and what reality requires. The plan says go east. The terrain says go north. And the organization, lacking any mechanism for reassessing, marches east into a wall.
The organizations that thrive through disruption don't have better plans. They have a better process for sensing, choosing, designing, and delivering — and they run that process continuously, not once every three years.
The Flywheel vs. the Filing Cabinet
Think about the difference between two approaches to strategy.
The filing cabinet approach: Leadership convenes. A plan is produced. It goes into the filing cabinet (or, more realistically, the shared drive). Teams execute. Three years later, leadership convenes again, produces a new plan that ignores most of what was learned during execution, and the cycle resets to zero.
The flywheel approach: The organization runs a continuous cycle — discover what stakeholders need, define strategic choices, develop the capabilities to deliver, and operate in ways that produce real value. Operational experience generates evidence. That evidence feeds back into discovery. Discovery triggers strategic reassessment. Updated strategy drives capability evolution. And each turn of the cycle builds on the last.
The first turn of the flywheel takes the most energy. You're establishing purpose, making choices for the first time, assessing capabilities from scratch, designing operations with limited evidence. It's slow and effortful.
But the second turn is faster. You're not starting from zero. You have evidence from the first cycle. You know your stakeholders better. You understand your capabilities more honestly. Your governance muscles are developing.
By the third turn, something qualitatively different has emerged. The organization doesn't just have a better strategy. It has a different capability: the ability to sense shifts, make choices under uncertainty, design responses, and deliver — then learn from the result and do it again. Each cycle makes the next one faster, more focused, and more confident.
This is the flywheel effect. The organizations that survive disruption aren't the ones with the best initial plan. They're the ones whose flywheel is already spinning when the disruption hits.
Five Traps That Break the Flywheel
The flywheel only works if the connections between phases hold. Break a connection, and you get a predictable failure pattern. Here are the five most common:
The Do-It-All Trap. The organization refuses to make trade-offs. Every opportunity is pursued. Every stakeholder is served. Resources spread across too many priorities, and nothing gets the sustained investment it needs. This isn't ambition. It's the absence of strategy. The fix: explicit choices about where you won't play, not just where you will.
The Don Quixote Trap. The organization has noble purpose but no capability to deliver on it. The vision is inspiring. The strategic commitments are bold. And the organization's actual capacity to execute is nowhere near what the strategy requires. Nobody assessed the gap before making the commitment. The fix: honest capability assessment before strategic promises, not after.
The Waterloo Trap. The organization ignores the environment. It builds strategy based on internal ambition without scanning for the forces that could derail it — regulatory shifts, competitive dynamics, technological disruption, economic change. It marches confidently into a battle it can't win. The fix: environmental scanning as a design input, not an afterthought.
The Program-of-the-Month Trap. New initiatives launch in rapid succession, but none receives the sustained operational commitment needed to produce results. Each new priority displaces the last before it takes root. The organization is always starting and never finishing. The fix: governance that protects existing commitments from being cannibalized by the next shiny idea.
The Dreams-That-Never-Come-True Trap. Bold strategic aspirations never translate into organizational capability. The strategy looks brilliant in the boardroom but never reaches the teams that have to execute it. There's a plan, but no architecture connecting the plan to the organization's actual capacity. The fix: every strategic commitment must include an honest assessment of the capabilities required to deliver it.
Every one of these traps is a broken connection. The Do-It-All Trap breaks the choice-making phase. Don Quixote breaks the connection between strategy and capability. Waterloo breaks the environmental sensing. Program-of-the-Month breaks the connection between capability and operations. Dreams-That-Never-Come-True breaks the handoff from strategy to capability design.
If you can identify which connection is broken, you know where to look.
From Fragile to Adaptive
Consider three types of organizations:
Fragile organizations break under pressure. They have rigid plans, fixed structures, and no mechanism for adapting when assumptions fail. When disruption hits, the response is paralysis or panic. Forty-seven ideas on a whiteboard, no criteria for choosing among them, and months of floundering while the crisis deepens.
Resilient organizations absorb pressure and return to their previous state. They're tough. They survive the disruption. But they don't learn from it. They emerge unchanged, ready to be disrupted again by the same forces. Resilience without learning is just endurance.
Adaptive organizations grow stronger through pressure. They use disruption as a signal to reassess, redesign, and evolve. Each disruption makes them more capable of handling the next one, because the cycle of sensing, choosing, designing, and delivering becomes faster and more confident with practice.
The difference between these three isn't resources, or talent, or luck. It's discipline. Fragile organizations have no process for adapting. Resilient organizations have a process for surviving. Adaptive organizations have a process for learning — and they run it continuously.
Same Organization. Two Disruptions. Different Responses.
The clearest proof of the flywheel is watching the same organization face two disruptions at different points in its development.
Disruption one hits before the flywheel exists. There's no shared framework. No clear purpose. No strategic choices in place. No capability map. No governance system. The response: panic, brainstorming sessions that produce dozens of ideas and no criteria for choosing, months of paralysis while the crisis deepens.
Disruption two hits after several turns of the flywheel. The purpose is clear. Strategic choices are in place. Capabilities are mapped. Governance is operational. The response: a structured assessment using the framework already in hand. A nuanced decision — pursue what you're ready for, prototype what you're not, protect investments already in motion. Response time: weeks, not months.
The environment didn't get easier between the two disruptions. The organization got better at responding. That's the flywheel working. That's adaptive capacity.
And here's what makes it a sustainable advantage: competitors can copy your strategy. They can replicate your products. They can hire your talent. But they can't copy the organizational muscle built through years of disciplined cycling. That capability is embedded in how the organization thinks, decides, and operates. It's not a plan. It's a practice.
The Signals That Tell You It's Time
The flywheel doesn't restart on a calendar. It restarts when signals indicate that the current cycle's assumptions no longer hold.
Operational signals: Outcomes declining despite stable operations. Stakeholder satisfaction dropping without an obvious cause. Front-line staff increasingly using workarounds. Growing distance between what you deliver and what stakeholders report needing.
Environmental signals: Regulatory shifts. New competitors. Technology changes. Shifts in funding, demographics, or political context. The ground moving under assumptions you haven't revisited.
Strategic signals: Your stated strategy and your actual investments telling different stories. Capability investments not producing the expected returns. Key hypotheses quietly disproven but never formally acknowledged.
When these signals appear, the question isn't whether to respond. It's whether you have the flywheel in place to respond well — or whether you're back to the whiteboard with forty-seven ideas and no criteria.
Start the Flywheel
You don't need to build the complete system before you start cycling. You need to start cycling in order to build the system.
Pick the weakest connection in your organization. Is it the gap between purpose and strategy? Between strategy and capability? Between capability and operations? Between operations and purpose?
That broken connection is where the flywheel is stuck. Fix that connection — even partially, even imperfectly — and the cycle starts moving. Each turn makes the next one smoother. Each cycle reveals the next connection that needs attention.
The organizations that wait until they have the perfect framework before starting never start. The ones that start imperfectly and improve through practice are the ones that build adaptive capacity.
Your first strategic plan failed because the world changed. Your second one will fail for the same reason — unless you stop treating strategy as a document and start treating it as a discipline. Not a plan you write. A flywheel you spin.
This post is drawn from Closing the Strategy-Execution Gap, a self-paced course that follows one institution through multiple turns of the flywheel — including the moment when a second disruption proves the discipline is real.