Why 95% of employees can't name their organisation's strategy - Martin Eriksson (The Decision Stack)
Martin Eriksson is a Product Leader, Co-founder of Mind the Product and ProductTank, and Author. His new book, The Decision Stack, offers a mental model for connecting every layer of organisational strategy — from vision to the decisions teams make every single day.We discuss:
— Why 95% of employees cannot name their organisation's strategy — and what that costs
— The five questions every company must be able to answer, from vision to principles
— Why strategy is the most commonly missing layer in the stack, and why exec teams are often reluctant to fill it
— How to challenge upwards and surface strategic gaps without calling leadership out
— Why empowering teams without context sends them running in every direction
— How principles — not values — are the tool that eliminates recurring debates
— The "this or that" technique for making trade-offs visible across a team
— Why you cannot communicate strategy often enough
Chapters
— 00:00 Introduction
— 01:11 Martin's background in product
— 02:19 The origin of The Decision Stack
— 03:44 The five questions the stack answers
— 04:27 Why strategy is most often missing or unclear
— 08:18 Who should be making strategic decisions
— 09:44 Time horizons: how long should strategy last
— 11:43 Using the decision stack in practice
— 13:36 How to surface gaps from lower in the organisation
— 16:01 Why context is the prerequisite for empowerment
— 19:32 How the stack reduces decision-making overhead
— 21:04 Language, frameworks, and avoiding rigidity
— 23:43 Where to start: top-down or bottom-up
— 26:34 Fractal stacks and scaling across teams
— 28:44 Strategy for maintenance work and existing products
— 31:41 The role of principles at the foundation of the stack
— 33:38 How principles emerge — top-down and bottom-up
— 37:07 The "this or that" technique for surfacing trade-offs
— 39:26 Communicating strategy continuously across the organisation
— 43:34 The most common mistake when getting started
Key takeaways
— Strategy is the foundation. Research cited in the book shows that 95% of employees cannot name their organisation's strategy. Martin argues this is the single biggest failure point in most companies, and that exec teams often compound the problem by avoiding the hard choices that real strategy requires.
— The stack answers five questions. Where are we going? How are we going to get there? What is important right now and how do we measure progress? What actions are we going to take? And how do we choose between them? The tools — vision, strategy, OKRs, opportunities, principles — matter less than whether those questions are genuinely answered and connected.
— Empowerment without context is abandonment. Teams that are given autonomy but no strategic clarity do not make better decisions — they scatter. The decision stack exists to give direction to empowerment, so people know which direction to run in before they are given the freedom to run.
— Strategy drifts if you do not maintain it. As markets shift, as new people join, as AI changes assumptions almost overnight, the risk is not that a strategy was wrong at the outset — it is that no one updated it. Martin recommends at minimum a quarterly check-in, even for organisations with a five-year strategy.
— Principles eliminate recurring debates. When Monster's CEO declared that building the best experience for job seekers would always come first, the weeks-long internal debate about recruiter versus job seeker priority disappeared overnight.
— Communication is never a one-off. A twenty-slide strategy deck shared once at an all-hands is not communication — it is an announcement. Martin references Jeff Weiner's maxim: by the time you are sick of saying something, people are just beginning to hear it. The stack has to live inside existing ceremonies, not sit in a document that no one revisits.
— Start where you are, not from scratch. The most common mistake is treating the stack as a reason to tear everything down and rebuild from a blank canvas. For most organisations, the better approach is diagnostic — audit what exists, find the connections that are broken or missing, and start there.
Featured links
The Decision Stack — Martin's new book: https://www.thedecisionstack.com/
The trade-off poll tool mentioned in the episode: https://thisorthat.thedecisionstack.com/
ProductTank:
Martin Eriksson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martineriksson/
HBR: The Office of Strategy Management — source of the 95% statistic cited in the episode: https://hbr.org/2005/10/the-office-of-strategy-management Receive SMS online on sms24.me
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