Is Your Strategy Internally Focused? The One Test That Tells You
Remove your company’s name from each Strategic Choice. What remains reveals whether your plan points at the market or at your own organization.
Direct Answer
Take each Strategic Choice in your plan and remove your company’s name from it. If the statement still describes a real change that has to happen in the market, it’s a Strategic Choice. If what’s left describes something your own team will do, it’s an internal decision — useful, maybe, but not strategy. Most plans fail this test more often than the people who wrote them expect, and not because anyone decided to look inward. Here’s what the difference sounds like in a single budget cycle.
The Scene
Two directors, same quarter, same budget cycle, two very different conversations.
The first walks in with a sequenced list of activities and a price tag attached — hire two, launch three, run four campaigns. The second refuses to open with a list at all. He starts with one question: what has to become true out in the market before any of this is worth funding?
Only one of those is a strategic choice. The other is a budget request wearing a strategy’s clothes — and it’s the far more common of the two.
Why Strategy Drifts Inward
It isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a default. Leaders who step into broader, senior roles tend to get pulled inward — resolving conflicts, reconciling budgets, managing performance — and pay less attention to competitor moves, customer needs, and where the market is heading. Asked to show their strategy, many hand over a plan full of product quotas and market-share targets, or a mission and values statement, and rarely a clear picture of who they’ll serve, who they won’t, and why a customer would choose them over the alternative (Carucci, 2017). One executive in that research put it more bluntly than most would admit out loud: “We all fake it till we make it.” It shows up in the calendar, too: Kaplan and Norton’s research found that some 85% of management teams spend less than an hour a month talking about strategy (Norton, 2012).
Internal issues are visible, urgent, and inside your control, so attention drifts there whether or not anyone decides it should. The market — where the strategy is actually supposed to win — gets the leftover hour.
The Test, Named
Causal Cubed™ builds the correction directly into the method. A Strategic Choice has exactly one test before anything is built beneath it: remove the company’s name from the statement. If it still describes a real change that has to happen in the market, it’s a Strategic Choice. If it describes something your own team will do, it’s an internal decision, and it goes back to the table. Nothing advances past that layer of the cascade until it passes.
Run it on the two directors. “Hire two, launch three, run four campaigns” means nothing without the company attached — it was only ever about the company. The second director’s question can’t even be answered without naming the market. That’s the whole difference, and it’s visible in a single sentence.
Next Step
The fastest way to know whether your own strategy points at the market or at the org chart: take the free Activity Fallacy Test — four questions, about two minutes.
References
Carucci, R. (2017, November 13). Executives fail to execute strategy because they’re too internally focused. Harvard Business Review.
Hickman, A. (2012, November 6). Norton: Balanced Scorecard must adapt to remain relevant [Interview with David Norton]. FM Magazine.
Links onward: the free Test, Strategic Choice vs. Objective, and the Framework page.
