Nearly everywhere I’ve worked, someone will make the point that everything we do is tactical and not strategic. We focus too much on work that produces short-term results rather than work that will serve us in the long run.

Everything I would observe would suggest that “leaders” were thinking strategically. After all, isn’t that the core of their job? To be thinking about the long-term future of the organisation.

The more I think about it, the more I see this as a symptom of the divide that develops between those thinking about the work and those doing the work. Leaders that sit in ivory towers, disconnected from the reality of how work is done. They don’t understand the implications of their strategy because they haven’t thought through their problems and haven’t taken the time to understand the context of how work takes place.