Priorities get interpreted differently across teams. You’re losing too many great people. Issues surface late — or not at all.

Nothing is broken enough to force a reset, but you have the sense that your organization, as strong as the people are, isn’t making the impact it could.

This is not a strategy problem. It’s a management problem.

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Good strategy fails too often. Not because the plan was wrong, but because there was no reliable way to carry it through the organization. When teams are spinning their wheels or getting stuck, it is almost always because the management layer doesn’t have the systems and support it needs to function well.

If you’re new to this series, we’ve previously covered why management infrastructure matters and what excellent management looks like in practice. Both are worth your time.

This piece shows you the whole system, and the rest of the series will give you practical, low-lift ways to strengthen each element of your management infrastructure.

Here’s what we’ll cover. Management infrastructure has three distinct domains, each solving a different problem. Structural Clarity is about whether managers actually know what the job is and have what they need to do it consistently. Collective Leadership is about whether managers operate as a coordinated layer or just a group of individuals who happen to share a reporting structure. And Management System Continuity is about whether your management strength holds when people leave, roles shift, and the organization evolves…or resets every time. For each, we’ll lay out what strong looks like, what happens when it breaks down, and a few diagnostic questions to help you figure out where you stand.

What Management Infrastructure Actually Is

Strategy is the plan for how you’ll win. Execution is the work that gets you there. Management is everything in between — the mechanism that converts intent into action, across teams, over time.

When that mechanism is strong, strategy travels. When it’s weak, it gets lost in translation, reinterpreted by each manager, filtered through each team, and diluted by the time it reaches the people doing the work.

Infrastructure is what makes the mechanism strong. Not just individual managers but the system they operate within.

Management infrastructure is a system, built deliberately, operated collectively, and strengthened over time.

That system has three parts. Each solves a different problem.

Domain 1: Structural Clarity

Structural Clarity is about the role itself. Do managers actually understand what the job is, and do they have what they need to do it consistently?

Strong structural clarity means four things are true:

1. There’s a shared definition of what excellent management looks like (and it’s used consistently)

2. Managers understand their job is to own team outcomes, not to be high-performing individual contributors who play a largely administrative role with direct reports

3. Decision boundaries are clear enough that managers know when to move and when to align

4. Core practices — 1:1s, feedback, performance conversations — are defined and used consistently.

When this breaks down: expectations vary by team, accountability weakens, and managers fill in the gaps — each in their own way. And over time, those differences become the system.

Quick check:

• Do you have a shared, explicit definition of excellent management and management goals and are they regularly used to guide, support, and make hiring and promotion decisions?

• Do your managers fully embrace their role of owning team outcomes, or are they still doing too much of the work themselves?

• Are decision boundaries clear? Do managers know when they can act independently vs when they need to align or get sign-off?

• Do managers have access to the core practices of strong management, and are they using them consistently?

Domain 2: Collective Leadership

Collective Leadership is about how managers operate together. Do they function as a coordinated leadership layer or as a set of individuals who happen to share a reporting structure?

This is a domain organizations often skip entirely.

When managers operate as a team, their impact can multiply — and the management layer becomes more than a collection of individuals doing the same job in parallel.

Strong collective leadership means three things are true: managers have a consistent shared forum to align, calibrate, coordinate and solve problems together; they are getting the context they need to lead and have clear pathways to surface what senior leaders need to hear with a consistent information flow across the management layer — downward with context, upward with signal; and there is one person with explicit responsibility for owning the health and strengthening of the management layer.

When this breaks down: Managers often receive information too late, without context, or inconsistently. Teams move in different directions. Decisions conflict and alignment is hard to find. Issues that cross team lines fall through the gaps — and senior leaders lose the signal. Cross-organization learning happens sporadically at best, and managers are left to navigate through challenges alone. The responsibility for addressing any of this doesn’t quite belong to anyone, so it persists, and even the strongest managers can struggle.

Quick check:

• Do your managers have a consistent, shared forum for alignment, collaboration and shared problem-solving?

• Does information flow reliably in both directions, with managers receiving the context they need and having clear pathways to surface what senior leaders need to hear?

• Is it someone’s actual, explicit responsibility to manage the management layer and do they have capacity dedicated to strengthening it and tools to do that?

Domain 3: Management System Continuity

Management System Continuity is about durability. Does management strength hold as people change, roles shift, and the organization evolves — or does it reset every time someone leaves?

The pattern is familiar. A strong manager builds a strong team. That manager gets worn down without a system built to support them. They leave.The team struggles. The senior team scrambles. A replacement is found and the cycle starts again. This isn’t a talent problem. It’s a continuity problem, and it’s entirely solvable.

Strong continuity means three things are true: Manager support and development is ongoing and embedded in the work, not understood as solely a one-time training; managers have the time and capacity to manage well, not just carry individual workload with a new title; and potential new managers are identified and have opportunities to build their skills before they’re promoted, not starting after.

When this breaks down: Management quality fluctuates with individuals and there’s no consistent path for improvement. Strong managers build strong teams and when they leave, team performance drops and resets. Development is episodic. New managers are underprepared. Managers don’t have enough time or capacity to manage as well as they want to and need to, so the work may still get done, but performance issues go unaddressed, development conversations don’t happen, and team problems compound. Some of your top staff start to leave. Organizational effectiveness becomes dependent on whoever happens to be there at the time.

Quick check

• Is manager development ongoing and embedded in the work — or treated as a one-time event only, with minimal follow-up?

• Do your managers have the time and capacity they need to manage well?

• Do you know who your next managers might be — and are you supporting them to build their skills now, before they’re promoted?

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Where to Start (No Overhaul Required)

You very likely have many of these elements in place already and others that are missing or not as strong as they could be. If you see gaps in more than one domain, that’s normal.

You don’t need to fix everything at once (and we encourage you not to). Strengthening even one part of the system makes the whole layer stronger.

If you don’t yet have a written, shared definition of what excellent management looks like, that’s your foundation. Start there. (See Article 2.)

If you have that, look at the three domains and pick something that won’t take a ton of effort, but will move things in the right direction — strengthen something that already exists or begin building where the gap is sharpest.

Just make one deliberate move. A single structural fix, a clear decision boundary, a consistent 1:1 practice, a manager forum that meets and is useful — any one of these will make a substantive difference and add strength to the system.

Management infrastructure isn’t built in a sprint. But it also doesn’t require a total overhaul. It requires someone deciding that the management layer is worth investing in as a system and then doing that systematically and consistently.

Making that decision gives you a lasting advantage — a deeper impact and the ability to hold up when things get hard.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is to make the system you have stronger than it is today.

From here, we’ll focus on the how — practical ways to make real improvements that fit inside the work you’re already doing.

As part of the larger Strategic Agility Reboot Series, this sub-series is focused on how to build the conditions for great management across your team: grounded in clear standards, and enabled and sustained by an infrastructure that makes management excellence the default, not the exception.

Today: what excellent management actually means and the first step to operationalizing it, whether you own management for your whole organization, your team, or just yourself.

What does “excellent” actually mean? Our version

Great staff management means setting an organization (or team) up to deliver on its mission long-term by making sure you have the right people in the right roles, each with what they need to make their greatest impact over time.

Excellent management includes four core pillars. Here’s a little more on each.

1. Equity

None of the others matter — they won’t work — if equity isn’t the operating principle underneath all of them. Whether you’re building trust, setting expectations, or investing in someone’s growth — the questions always include: for whom, on what basis, and have I checked for implicit bias? If the answer is shaped more by shared identity and unconscious bias than actual performance and potential, the whole system is compromised.

2. Results focus over the long term

Not just making people feel good. Not just hitting this quarter’s metrics. Real impact, delivered consistently, over time. That requires two things that are easy to deprioritize when everyone is busy:

• Strategic trade-offs. The ability to think several moves ahead and make short-term sacrifices where needed for long-term gain.

• Investment in people’s growth. People leave when they feel that their organization isn’t supporting them and their growth. The ones who stay in those circumstances aren’t set up to contribute at their highest level. That’s not just a retention problem — it’s a results problem.

Excellent managers invest in their people and in themselves. A manager who isn’t growing is a ceiling.

3. Clarity and accountability

Clarity lives in three core places: the role itself, the goals that define success, and discrete projects. It also includes how work gets navigated, like how decisions get made, and how trade-offs are weighed.

Accountability follows: expecting people to do what they said, actively supporting them when they fall short, and making harder decisions when the gap persists.

4. Trust, cohesion, and strategic coherence

Trust is the foundation — relationships strong enough to make candor possible, where people share strategic insights, flag problems before they become crises, and feel genuinely valued. Built on that: team cohesion, the sense that people are in it together, and strategic coherence — where people understand how their work connects to everyone else’s, how decisions ripple across roles, and what it feels like to operate as a unit.

That’s the definition. Now here’s where it gets structural.

What you can do from where you are.

→ If you lead the organization or have org-wide authority over management practice — This work is yours to lead or make sure someone else does. Draft it, get input, and put it in motion.

→ If you manage managers but don’t set the tone for the whole org — You don’t have to wait. Build the framework for your department or division. Define what excellent management looks like for your team and build in the feedback loops and coaching conversations that help your managers actually get there. A draft you can update is infinitely more useful than a perfect one that never arrives.

→ If you’re a manager who isn’t managing managers — Use this for yourself. Take the definition and bring it into a conversation with your own manager. Where do you feel strong? What would help you get there? You’re not asking for a favor. You’re asking for the infrastructure you need to do your best work.

Wherever you sit: You don’t need permission to get clearer. You might need to adjust later. That’s fine. Clarity now beats waiting for the perfect conditions that may never come.

The Next Step: Develop a Set of Baseline Management Goals

This is where you begin building infrastructure.

Baseline Management Goals describe what excellence actually looks like for your organization, and they become goals for every manager, regardless of scope or level.

Expectations that are written down, shared, and checked in on regularly are the first structural layer of a system that makes great management the default.

Managers can add goals specific to their context on top of these, but the baseline applies to everyone.

For more ideas on what additional manager-specific goals could look like, click here.

Example Set of Baseline Management Goals

BASELINE MANAGER GOALS FOR 2026

• All of the people on my team are on track to hit their goals or have a plan to shift strategies

• For each person on my team, I can point to at least 2 indicators that tell me they feel valued — as a person, for their work, and for their input. Indicators could include:

  • they regularly contribute their ideas and expertise in decision-making

  • they have strong working relationships within and outside of our team

  • they’ve given me thoughtful feedback about how I can improve in my own management

  • they’ve told me directly

• Any performance problems have been addressed fairly, thoughtfully, and quickly

• There are no discrepancies by race or gender identity in any of the above areas

If you want to go deeper on the how-to of goal setting, check out this guide.

Questions? Pushback? Requests? Email us at Susannah@hookrodgersconsulting.com.

Your Move This Week: Draft & Get Input

1. Draft your set of baseline management goals — it doesn’t have to be perfect, what you want is a version you can share with other people to get their feedback. You can use our sample above as a starting point or start fresh.

These questions can help you get started:

• When a manager is doing an excellent job, how do you know?

• What results do you see?

• How will you know whether they’re on track?

2. Get some initial input.

If you’re building this for your team, your list includes:

• Your own manager — you’ll want at least quick alignment on your plan and on the first draft before you send it out more broadly.

• All of the managers on your team. We’re serious. You could get to a version by engaging just a small group, but engaging all managers will get you better insights and stronger alignment on the final product. Skipping this step will bite you later.

• Additional individual staff (where useful) — you can do this through: a working group that gives deeper input from early on, managers getting input from their teams once you have a good working draft, an all-staff comment period closer to final.

If you’re building this for your organization, your list also includes:

• Your senior leadership team — you’ll want alignment at the top before this rolls out broadly, both on the definition of excellence and on the plan for implementation.

Balance getting the input you need without creating layers or barriers that aren’t meaningful.

Don’t get stalled out by process overwhelm: Start by thinking through whose input you need first, and send your draft to that person or group.

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Tips for Getting Input

1. Be transparent about what kind of input you’re asking for. Not all feedback is the same, and people give better reactions when they know what you need. Name which mode you’re in:

• Brainstorming — You’re early, open to anything, and want people to think out loud with you.

• Kicking the tires — You have a draft and a theory, and you want people to push back, test it, and make it better. Tear it down if needed.

• Big red flags only — This is mostly baked. It’s gone through real refinement. You’re not looking for a rewrite; you’re asking people to catch anything glaring before you finalize.

Naming the mode upfront saves everyone time and energy — and signals that you’ve actually thought about what you need, which makes people more likely to give it to you.

2. Lay out specific questions. This helps people know you really do want their thoughts, and helps you get the specific input you need.

• Does this definition reflect what you think excellent management actually looks like here?

• What’s missing?

• What’s here that doesn’t belong?

• Is there anything that’s unclear or needs to be defined differently?

And when you’ve gathered input and made changes — tell them. Circle back. This is one of the fastest ways to signal that this isn’t just an exercise. It builds alignment, gets you better input down the road, and marks the beginning of real infrastructure.

Questions? Pushback? Requests? Email us at Susannah@hookrodgersconsulting.com.

For those new to the Strategic Agility series: a strategic operating system is the set of structures, rhythms, and decision-making infrastructure that make it possible to build for the long-term while executing in the short-term.

In our most recent work, we’ve been focused on three non-negotiable capabilities of this system for your organization:

• Bring the right people in.

• Manage them effectively once they’re there.

• Move them out if and when you need to.

We’ve written about #1, bringing the right people in (hiring) and #3, moving them out when you need to (firing). This article kicks off a dedicated series on #2 — managing people effectively across the organization once they’re there.

Over the course of this series, we will walk you through everything you need to build the infrastructure that makes great management the default, whether your organization has one manager or 100.

To get us started, we’re going to talk about how cars work

Let’s Talk About How Cars Work

A car has an engine.
The engine generates power.
But engines don’t move cars.

Transmissions do.

The engine creates force. The transmission converts that force into motion. It transfers power from the engine to the wheels. Without it, the engine can roar all it wants. The car won’t go anywhere.

Or worse — it will lurch, grind, overheat, and eventually break down.

Let’s talk about how organizations work.
An organization has a strategy.
Strategy generates direction and force.

But strategy doesn’t move organizations.

Management does.

Before we go further, this isn’t an argument that managers aren’t doing enough. Most managers are working incredibly hard. They care. They’re trying. Many are holding more complexity than their roles were ever designed to carry.

It’s an argument that committed, skilled managers who are asked to manage without a solid management infrastructure are ultimately being set up to fail.

Good managers operating within a strong management infrastructure are what convert strategic power into effective execution.

Without those components, the strategy can be bold, ambitious, and logically sound — and the organization still won’t move.

Or worse — it will surge in one area, stall in another, overextend in a third, and burn people out in the process.

When a car roars but won’t move, we don’t blame the engine. We don’t blame the driver.

We inspect the system that converts power into motion.

In organizations, when execution falters, we point to almost everything else:

→ The strategy — “We had the wrong plan.” (Execution failed, so the plan must be wrong.)
→ The people — “We have the wrong people.” (Talent should fix the system.)
→ The culture — “We don’t have a culture of accountability.” (As if culture exists outside structure.)
→ The external circumstances — “The environment shifted.” (Volatility explains inconsistency.)
→ The individual — “They’re not strong enough.” (We never defined strong.)

These are the easiest explanations to reach for. So we reach for them.

The plan might be part of it. The people might be part of it.

But when execution falters, it’s usually a breakdown in the system — the management system.

Transmissions are infrastructure — deliberately engineered systems built for precision and performance. They regulate power. They synchronize movement. They absorb strain. They ensure force reaches the wheels without tearing the system apart.

And when execution is steady — when talented people collaborate effectively and deliver sustained impact over months and years — that is a system working.

Management must be built the same way: as infrastructure.

When that infrastructure is weak, undefined, or inconsistent, no amount of horsepower will move you forward.

But when it’s strong, clear, and supported, power and momentum compound.

People, strategy, culture, and circumstances matter but infrastructure is what aligns them.

That’s what this series will show you how to do: build the infrastructure that makes strong management across your organization the default.

We’ll introduce the full management infrastructure in the next article. From there, we’ll go deep on each component — the templates, the frameworks, the tools.

But today, start here.

Define what good management looks like in your organization.

It sounds simple. Most organizations have never done it.

If you haven’t, or don’t, define it, every manager builds their own version. Standards drift. Expectations vary. Accountability becomes personality-dependent.

Some managers quietly hold the bar or raise it. Others quietly lower it. And some never realize there’s a bar in the first place.

No one is operating from the same definition. And no one is being held to one or fully supported to reach it.

The fix isn’t more training. It isn’t better feedback. It’s clarity.

A written management framework outlines the following:

• Why management matters here — and what “excellent” management looks like in practice.

• How managers will be supported to meet that standard.

It doesn’t have to be long.
It has to be deliberate.
And it has to be written.

Because if it isn’t written, reinforced, and tied to hiring and promotion decisions, it isn’t infrastructure.

It’s preference.

And preference is not a system.

Your move this week: Write it down.

Take 30 minutes and answer these two questions:

This is just for you — for now. And it’s just the first draft. Soon, you’ll want to gather input and share it with your management team, and we’ll give you tools to do that. For now, use this exercise to capture your own thinking.

We’ll share how we answer these questions as part of this series, but this step is about capturing your answers.

1. Why does management matter here? What does “excellent” actually mean?

You might write things like:

• Ensuring each person has what they need to succeed

• Flagging patterns, risks, and opportunities across the organization

• Translating organizational decisions into clarity for their teams

• Serving as a connective tissue between strategy and day-to-day work, and between their teams and the broader organization

Then think through what those things actually need to look like in your organization.

2. How will we support managers in meeting that bar?
What development, coaching, and infrastructure exist — or need to exist — to help them get there?

If there’s a gap between what you just wrote down and what you are seeing, that is okay. It’s normal and it’s fixable.

Not by asking people to try harder and not by (only) sending them to training, but by building the infrastructure that makes good management the default over time.

That’s what this series will show you how to do.

Start with the 30 minutes above.

We want to talk to you!

If any of this landed — whether you’re in the thick of these challenges or you’ve developed approaches that work — we want to hear about it. We’re scheduling 20-minute conversations with leaders to understand what’s helping you stay grounded and where you’re struggling. Your insights shape how we build this series.

Send us an email at info@hookrodgersconsulting.com to get on the books.

In the early 1980s, Van Halen was the biggest touring rock band in the world—and one of the most technically demanding. They were the first act to bring massive arena-scale lighting and staging rigs into smaller markets: nine eighteen-wheeler trucks of gear rolling into venues that had only ever handled three.

Along with this staggering infrastructure, they gave each hosting venue a 53-page contract rider detailing their specific requirements, and buried between voltage specs and load-bearing requirements was Article 126: “M&M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).”

The press treated this as rock star excess; spoiled brats demanding candy sorted by color. But it was not a diva move; it was a critical diagnostic.

If Van Halen walked backstage and saw brown M&M’s in the bowl, they knew the venue hadn’t read the rider carefully. And if they hadn’t read the contract carefully, the load-bearing calculations might be wrong. The power specs might be off. The rigging that held ten tons of lighting above the stage—directly above the band—might not hold. With nine trucks of heavy staging and lighting gear, a missed detail could mean a collapsed stage or an electrical fire.

In 1980, Van Halen arrived at a venue in Southern Colorado, hours after the venue had already set up the show’s equipment, and found Brown M&Ms in a bowl. They immediately ordered a full technical check and within minutes a significant structural problem was discovered: the staging had already sunk through the venue’s new flooring.

Had Van Halen taken the stage as it was, with the added weight of the band, crew, and movement during a live performance, the floor would have given way and the rigging, holding nine eighteen-wheelers’ worth of electrical equipment, would have come crashing down in a packed venue.

The Brown M&M diagnostic was not just a warning system, it was a confirmation tool; one small, visible failure that reliably predicted much larger ones.

Your ability to Fire people is your Brown M&M

A real strategic operating system has three non-negotiable capabilities: bring the right people in, manage them effectively once they’re there, and move them out if and when you need to.

Hiring is aspirational—it reveals what you hope for. Managing is intentional—it reveals what you’re willing to invest in. Firing is operationalizing your strategy. And how well you can (or can’t) do it is revelatory.

Your ability to fire someone, at the right time and in the right way, is one of the biggest indicators of organizational health, leadership effectiveness, and strategic fitness.

Firing well (timely, risk-managed, in a thoughtful way) is the one capability that depends on every other part of the strategic operating system working—the same parts that determine whether your organization can set direction, align resources, hold standards, and adapt when things change.

If your organization can fire well, it means:

• Roles are defined by outcomes, not activities.

• Expectations are communicated, not assumed.

• Direct communication is the norm, not the exception.

• Feedback is specific, useful, and delivered before it’s too late.

• Performance standards exist and are enforced consistently.

• Leaders trust that the system will back them when they act.

• HR operates as a strategic partner, not an obstacle to overcome.

• The accountability chain runs unbroken from Purpose to daily operations.

If your organization can’t fire well, those things are broken. Maybe all of them.

The cost of not firing someone who should be let go is enormous—and it compounds.
Time: Hours spent managing around the role instead of leading through it. 
Team: Absorbing the underperformance. Scrambling to keep work from dropping or slowed down. A growing belief that expectations, or good work, actually matter. Your stronger performers brushing off their resumes. 
Credibility: Standards have bent. Accountability has softened. Commitment to purpose and mission is questioned. 
Strategy: Priorities suffering. Opportunities passed by. 
Impact: Outcomes compromised. Critical milestones delayed. The toll paid by the people you exist to serve.

Now, Run the Test

You already know if there is someone who isn’t working out.

Now ask yourself honestly: could your organization move that person out—in a timely, defensible and fair way, without it becoming a crisis?

If the answer is yes, and it’s happening tomorrow, then you are the unicorn.

If the answer is no, then you’ve found your brown M&M. And like Roth walking backstage, your next move isn’t to fix the candy bowl. It’s to line-check the entire production.

Here’s where to look.

Line-Check #1: Role Clarity

The first place most systems break is at the beginning: what the role actually requires was never made explicit.

When expectations are vague, accountability is impossible. You can’t hold someone to a standard that was never communicated. And you certainly can’t defend a firing when the person can reasonably say, “No one ever told me what success looked like.”

Is there a list of clear goals and expectations for the role? Was that list informed by and aligned on by the key stakeholders? Was it reviewed with the employee? Did you check for understanding? Could the staff person and their manager independently describe what success looks like in this role and arrive at the same answer? And have the staff person’s goals shifted along with any strategic shifts so they reflect your actual current expectations? If not, then this person was set up to fail and it’s your fault. They may very well still need to be let go, but you’ve got to go back and clean up the process from step 1.

Line-Check #2: Feedback Infrastructure

If you can’t fire someone, ask: was this person told—specifically, directly, and in writing—that their performance wasn’t meeting expectations? And were they told on several occasions over time without seeing improvement?

In most organizations, the answer is no. Managers haven’t built muscle around giving effective feedback, or they have but bad culture suffocated good skills and now feedback is vague, euphemistic, or absent entirely. Leaders hint. They soften. They sandwich so hard the meat disappears.

The person in the role receives just enough signal to feel uneasy but never enough clarity to change course or understand the stakes.

Responsible firing requires specific, documented feedback delivered early and often. Without that, firing feels arbitrary and cruel—because it is. You haven’t built the process that makes the decision legible.

Line-Check #3: Discipline Infrastructure

Feedback tells someone where they stand. Discipline infrastructure gives them a structured path to close the gap or confirms that it can’t be closed. Without it, there’s no bridge between “we told them” and “we acted.”

This is where most organizations have the biggest gap. They may deliver some version of feedback, but when the feedback doesn’t produce change, there’s no defined next step. No escalation path. No structured process that moves from verbal conversation to written documentation to formal improvement plan to decision. So the feedback just… repeats. The same conversation, quarter after quarter, with no trajectory and no consequence.

What the infrastructure actually requires:

A codified progressive sequence. Verbal warning, written warning, formal improvement plan, separation. Everyone, from the manager to the employee to HR to senior leadership, should know the steps and what triggers each one.

A real improvement plan template. Not a vague directive to “do better.” A defined gap, measurable milestones, a specific timeline (often 30 days or fewer is enough; reserve longer periods only where it’s truly needed), a clear picture of what success looks like, a plan for what kinds of reasonable supports they’ll get to improve the missing skills, and an explicit statement of what happens if it’s not met.

Honest alignment before the process starts. The manager and anyone else who plays a key role in the process (their manager? HR?) have to be aligned on what the improvement plan is actually for. Is this a genuine chance to course-correct, or a documented path to exit? Both are legitimate. But everyone involved needs to be honest about which one it is.

Clear evaluation criteria. What constitutes “meeting milestones” vs. “showing effort but not getting there” needs to be defined upfront and not adjudicated after the fact. Without this, the evaluation at the end becomes subjective, and subjective evaluations get challenged, reversed, or avoided entirely.

A decision framework for when discipline is and isn’t appropriate. Sometimes the gap is trainable and a structured plan is the right move. Sometimes the misalignment is fundamental: a values mismatch, a role that’s shifted beyond the person’s capacity, or a fit issue that no improvement plan will fix. Leaders need guidance on when to engage the discipline process and when to move directly toward separation, so that performance improvement plans (PIPs) aren’t used to delay the inevitable.

Manager training. Most managers have never been taught how to write an improvement plan that is honest, specific, and legally defensible. They’ve never practiced delivering one. They don’t know how to hold the line through the uncomfortable middle period. This is a skill that has to be built.

And then there’s the cultural layer: the organization has to actually use this infrastructure.

The standard for the organization should be that progressive discipline is a responsibility to the person, not a punishment: we owe you clarity about where you stand and a real chance to close the gap.

Line-Check #4: Institutional Trust

Here’s the one that rarely gets named out loud: leaders don’t trust the organization to stand behind them.

Before they ask “Should this person go?” they ask a quieter, more pragmatic question: What happens to me if I try to do this?

Will HR back the decision—or retreat into risk management the moment things get uncomfortable? Will peers support it—or second-guess it in private meetings after the fact? Will senior leadership hold the line—or flinch and ask for “one more chance” once emotions rise? Will the documentation process protect anyone—or collapse under scrutiny?

When the answer is “I’m not sure,” most leaders stall, which is the rational choice! Firing is one of the few decisions where the consequences are asymmetric: if it goes well, nothing visible happens; if it goes poorly, the leader owns the fallout reputationally, politically, and sometimes legally.

Imagine if Roth found brown M&Ms night after night and nothing happened—the crew shrugged, the promoter pushed back, and the show went on anyway. The diagnostic would still work. It would just stop mattering.

That’s what happens when leaders surface performance problems and the organization doesn’t back them up. Over time, leaders learn to stop pulling the trigger on the diagnostic at all. They soften feedback. They manage around the problem. They stop naming what they see. And the organization learns a devastating lesson: standards exist, but they don’t mean anything.

Line-Check #5: The Accountability Chain

A strategic operating system links purpose to priorities, priorities to roles, roles to performance, and performance to consequences. When the chain is intact, firing is the natural, unsurprising conclusion of a transparent process. When it’s broken, firing feels like an emotional cliff-edge, because there’s nothing connecting the decision to anything that came before it.

Check each link:

Purpose to priorities. Does everyone in the organization know what the current strategic priorities actually are?

Priorities to roles. Is each role explicitly connected to a strategic priority? Can each person articulate how their work advances the strategy? Or are roles defined by activities rather than outcomes?

Roles to performance. Are there real, defined, measurable expectations for each role?

Performance to consequences. When someone doesn’t meet those standards, does anything actually happen? Do they hear directly and clearly from their manager where they missed the mark, and have a chance to improve?

When any link in this chain is broken, the final step—firing someone who is consistently not meeting expectations—becomes impossible. Not because the leader lacks nerve, but because the system never built the connective tissue that makes the decision defensible.

Line-Check #6: The Stories Leaders Tell Themselves

Even when the infrastructure exists, leaders often stall because of narratives that feel like compassion but function as avoidance. These are the rationalizations that surface the moment someone says, “Well, you need to fire that person”:

• “We’d lose too much institutional knowledge.”

• “No one else could do this role right now.”

• “This just isn’t the right moment.”

• “They’re not great, but they’re not terrible.”

• “Replacing them would be incredibly disruptive.”

• “What if we just narrow the scope a bit?”

• “I feel responsible for this person’s livelihood.”

Notice what’s missing from all of these: any clear assessment of whether the person is doing the job at the level the strategy requires. These aren’t arguments for keeping someone. They’re confessions that the system can’t tolerate the consequences.

This one: “I feel responsible for this person’s livelihood.” That instinct is human. But it’s misplaced. Your responsibility as a leader is to the mission, the strategy, the stakeholders, and the team executing the work. When you keep someone in a role they’re failing at because you feel bad about what firing means for their life, you are prioritizing one person’s comfort over everyone else’s ability to do their jobs, the mission you were hired to support, and the job you get paid to do. And you’re likely holding them back from finding a role that is truly a good fit for them.

And here’s the part nobody says: keeping someone in a role they’re failing at isn’t protecting them either. They know. They feel the workarounds, the reassigned projects, the conversations that stop when they enter the room. This is a person’s career—finite, non-renewable time—and keeping someone in a role where they cannot succeed is both a strategic and a moral failure. Unless you are prepared to keep them on staff at the same pay grade until they retire, you are not helping them. You are spending their time for them.

Line-Check #7: Union Environments

Everything above applies in union environments, and the stakes are higher, not lower. Collective bargaining agreements do not eliminate the strategic imperative to manage performance. They define the process by which you do it. Leaders who treat the contract as a reason not to act are confusing constraint with exemption.

Union environments require more discipline, not less: clearer roles, tighter documentation, earlier feedback, and strict adherence to progressive discipline. This is infrastructure that protects everyone. The contract governs how you act. Strategy determines when and why you must.

What the Diagnostic Demands

Van Halen didn’t put the M&M clause in the rider because they cared about candy. They put it there because they understood that when the stakes are high, you need a fast, reliable way to know whether the system beneath you is working—before something fails catastrophically.

Firing works the same way in an organization. It’s not the point. It’s the test. And if the test reveals failure, the response is to build the infrastructure that makes firing someone fair, defensible, and unsurprising.

If you find brown M&Ms in the bowl, don’t just pick them out. Line-check the entire production.

Start building.

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There’s a pause. Then the Big Boss leans back and says: “I think Option B is the smart play.”

Heads nod. Someone says, “Yeah, that feels right to me too.”

The conversation then turns to operationalizing the “smart play.”

Nine months later, the initial problem is worse. In the debrief, someone says, “We made smart choices with the information we had.” And everyone nods again.

The Anatomy of a Vacuum

That scene was inevitable. Not because of who was in the room, but because of what wasn’t.

No criteria for what makes a choice strategic—so “smart” filled the void. No protocol for how decisions of this magnitude get made—so the first confident voice won. No norm for pressure-testing—so agreement was the path of least resistance. No protected time for strategic thinking—so it got crammed into 4pm on a Friday when everyone was already depleted. No separation between proposing and deciding—so the Big Boss did both in one sentence. No practice at this—so the team didn’t have the muscle to engage even if they wanted to. No learning loop connecting past decisions to outcomes—so nine months later, the same pattern will repeat.

And this isn’t just one room. It’s every room. “Smart” shows up in weekly check-ins, performance reviews, hiring debriefs, feedback conversations, Slack threads. The word has been operationally normalized—baked into how organizations talk about people and decisions at every level. Which means the gap compounds everywhere, all the time.

This is how organizations fail. How promising leaders flame out. How movements that should have won don’t. Not in one dramatic moment, but in a thousand small moments where “smart” papers over two gaps at once: the strategic thinking that didn’t happen, and the strategic operating system that was never built.

Why “Smart” is a Desecration

If you want to save democracy, start by banning the word smart from organizational vocabulary. (And the full set of words at the end of this article.)

You’ve heard it. You’ve said it:

• “She’s so smart about this stuff.”

• “He’s one of the smartest (fill in role) I’ve ever worked with.”

• “That was a really smart call.”

• “We need smarter people in the room.”

When you say it, you don’t sound it.

People mean one of three things when they use the word “smart”:

1. It aligns with my beliefs. The position matches my values, so it must be the right call. This isn’t strategy. It’s ideological agreement dressed up as analysis.

2. It sounds good. Based on assumptions, gut, pattern-matching to something that worked before (or that we think worked before). This isn’t strategy either. It’s preference.

3. Strategic thinking. They saw the whole board. Anticipated second and third-order effects. Made a choice that serves the longer game, not just the immediate pressure. Didn’t just react—chose.

None of these are compliments. #3 would be if the person saying it cared enough to actually describe what you did so that you could do it again.

Burying strategic thinking under the word smart, is a desecration.

“It aligns with my beliefs”

• It stops inquiry. Once something’s labeled “smart,” we stop pressure-testing it. It becomes settled.

• It flatters the speaker. Calling something “smart” positions you as someone who can recognize smartness. It’s self-credentialing.

“It sounds good”

• Outcome-agnostic; a prediction dressed as an assessment, rewarding performance over substance.

• Credentialist. Used this way, “smart,” codes for educational background, who speaks a certain way. Excludes people who think strategically but don’t perform according to some code that has nothing to do with the quality of strategic thinking and works to stand in the way.

• Unfalsifiable. If it works, it was smart. If it fails, “well, circumstances changed.” No accountability.

“Strategic thinking”

• Frames this as trait alone, rather than a buildable capacity.

• Lets leadership off the hook for developing it in others.

• Is lazy.

Leadership Imperative

If you hold a leadership position in this movement, you have exactly three jobs: Think strategically. Build strategic thinking capacity in the people and systems around you. And measure whether it’s actually happening—not activity, not output, not effort, but whether leaders are thinking strategically and developing it in others.

If we mean what we say about winning, this is the work.

The Tuesday Alternative

It’s 2pm on a Tuesday. Same conference table. Same three options. But this time, when someone says “Option B feels smart,” the Big Boss leans forward instead of back.

“What has to be true for that to work? And how will we know if we’re wrong?”

The room gets uncomfortable. Then it gets productive. Assumptions surface. Someone admits they’ve been pattern-matching to a situation from three years ago that isn’t actually analogous. The CFO points out a dependency no one had named. They build trigger points into the timeline—moments where they’ll check whether their theory is holding.

When they leave at 4:30, no one calls the final choice “smart.” They call it pressure-tested. They call it strategic. They know what they’re betting on. They know what would prove them wrong. They know when they’ll look.

Nine months later, the initial problem isn’t solved—but they caught the misfire at month three and pivoted. They’re ahead of where they started.

This isn’t genius. It’s not even rare talent. It’s a practice. Learnable. Teachable. Buildable.

But only if we stop letting “smart” end the conversation before the real thinking begins.

The Strategy Lexicon

Your moves this week:

(1) Review the list of other useless words and phrases below and start to notice when and why you use them. Get uncomfortable when you do.

• “She just gets it” — trait, not teachable

• “Great instincts” — unfalsifiable

• “Natural leader” — born, not built

• “Savvy” — same energy, same emptiness

• “No-brainer” — conversation-ender disguised as clarity

• “Solid” — sounds like assessment, isn’t

• “The right call” — outcome-agnostic approval

• “Realistic” — shuts down ambition without analysis

Any word that lets the room skip the work of articulating why—what criteria, what assumptions, what would prove it wrong—is doing what “smart” does.

(2) Practice the better alternatives.

What to say instead of “smart”: If you actually mean it as a compliment, make it one. Name what they did so they can do it again:

• “That accounts for how they’ll respond” — names the second-order thinking

• “That gives us options if we’re wrong” — names the risk management

• “That serves the two-year goal, not just the immediate win” — names the time horizon

• “That’s a clear theory of change” — names what’s actually good about it

• “You saw something the rest of us missed—what tipped you off?”

If you’re not sure why it feels right, say that:

• “Something about this feels right to me but I can’t name it yet. Can we pressure-test it before we commit?”

• “I’m drawn to this option. Help me figure out if that’s strategy or preference.”

If you want to open inquiry instead of closing it:

• “Walk me through how you got there.”

• “What has to be true for this to work?”

• “How will we know if we’re wrong?”

• “Say more about the second-order effects.”

The goal isn’t nicer words. It’s words that open the next conversation instead of closing it.

(3) Check out the 2 part series on how to train strategic thinking in others.

Part 1:

Part 2:

And we want to hear from you. Really we do.

If any of this landed with you—whether you’re in the thick of these challenges or you’ve developed strategies that work—we want to hear about it. We’re scheduling 20 minute conversations with leaders to understand what’s helping you stay grounded as a strategic operator and where you’re struggling. Your insights will shape how we build this series and similar future projects. Send us an email at Susannah@hookrodgersconsulting.com to get on the books.

Quick preface: We heard from a number of people that they forwarded the last article (Part 1) to various employees / colleagues. If you are one of those people, please please please forward this one as well. Otherwise (see below) the first article didn’t matter at all.

Recap

Here’s the quick recap of what we covered in last week’s article (in more direct terms):

• The majority of employees lack the ability to think strategically (that includes your staff which includes your c-suite).

• You can do something about it. You can rewire someone else’s brain.

• And you should, because:

  • This is a fundamental responsibility of leadership and management.

  • Because winning depends on it.

In Part 1, we covered the foundation: shifting mindset from task-completion to goal-clarity, giving people visibility into strategy, and assigning work that requires strategic thinking — not just execution.

The steps laid out in Part 2 are based on the fundamental truth of people-based systems: foundations erode without reinforcement.

Tell us where you want us to dig in and how to best support you. 
We’re confident that we can. Send an email to Susannah@hookrodgersconsulting.com. Paragraphs or bullets welcomed. Please don’t spend a second on formatting, just get it to us.

Real Life Hits

You do steps 1-3. It feels good. You feel good. Your staff person feels invested in and starts to feel the synapses stretch. And it works for a few weeks, and then the pressure of daily operations takes over. Your promising strategic thinker reverts to reactive mode, because you did. The stretch project gets deprioritized. The big-picture questions disappear from your 1:1s because…Because.

This article covers the infrastructure that makes strategic thinking stick: tools, coaching, feedback, and habits. We are going to cover the four remaining elements of the framework after covering 1-3 in last Thursday’s post:

Let’s dig in.

4. Build Skills Through Tools and Frameworks

Strategic thinking feels abstract until you give people concrete ways to practice it.

Frameworks slow the brain down and force structured consideration of factors that reactive thinking skips over.

A few worth teaching:

• Scenario Thinking: When facing a decision, generate 2-3 alternative approaches before acting. Ask: “What happens if I do nothing? What if I go the opposite direction?” This builds the muscle of seeing options rather than defaulting to the first reasonable path.

• Systems Mapping: Draw out how the parts of a problem connect. Who are the stakeholders? What are the dependencies? Where are the feedback loops? This helps people see ripple effects before they create them.

• Root Cause Analysis (5 Whys): Keep asking “why” until you get past symptoms to underlying causes. Most reactive decisions solve the wrong problem because they stop at the surface.

• Pre-Mortem: Before launching an initiative, ask: “Imagine this failed. What went wrong?” It’s easier to see risks when you’re not defending a plan you’ve already committed to.

The key: don’t just teach these in a workshop and hope they stick. Assign them. “Before our next check-in, I want you to map out the stakeholders and dependencies for this project.” “Run a quick pre-mortem on this proposal and bring me the top three risks.”

Make the frameworks part of how work gets done, not a separate intellectual exercise.

5. Use Coaching and Reflective Questions

Strategic thinking is often caught, not just taught.

The questions you ask shape how your people think. If you only ask “Is it done?” you train for task completion. If you ask “What did you consider?” you train for strategic thinking.

Build these into your regular conversations:

The discipline: let them answer. Sit in the silence. Don’t rescue them with your own thinking. Then build on what they offer.

You’re training their internal voice to ask these questions when you’re not in the room.

6. Give Feedback on Strategic Thinking

Most feedback focuses on outcomes: Did you hit the deadline? Was the deliverable good?

If you want strategic thinkers, you need to give feedback on the thinking, not just the results.

Be specific:

Praise effective thoughtful planning, not just task completion. Call out when someone anticipates a problem, considers tradeoffs, or asks a clarifying question that changes the direction of a project.

What you reinforce, you get more of.

7. Make Strategic Reflection a Habit

Strategic thinking a practice.

Help your people build reflection into how they work:

After-action reviews: What worked? What didn’t? What would we do differently? Did we think long-term? This isn’t about blame — it’s about learning.What worked? What didn’t?

Weekly check-ins: Spend five minutes asking:

• “What’s one thing you did this week that was reactive? OR “Where did you catch yourself thinking reactively”

  • “How do you know it was reactive?”

  • “What was the thought process that led up to that?”

  • What was the thought process that reflects that?

• “What’s one thing you did this week that was strategic?” OR “Where did you catch yourself thinking strategically?”

  • “How do you know it was reactive?”

  • “What was the thought process that led up to that?”

Pre-work for 1:1s: Shift the meeting from status updates and do-out mentality to real development and a useful spend of time for both of you.

Ask them to come prepared with one strategic observation or question and then workshop the observation or question.

The goal is to make strategic thinking the default, not the exception. That only happens through repetition.

The Full Framework

Here’s what we’ve covered across both articles:

Your move this week

Pick one element from this article and put it into practice:

• Assign a framework to a current project (”Run a pre-mortem and bring me the top risks”)

• Ask a coaching question in your next 1:1 and resist the urge to answer it yourself

• Give one piece of feedback specifically about someone’s thinking, not their output

• Add a reflection question to your team’s regular rhythm

Strategic thinking is a skill. Skills are built through practice. Your job is to create the conditions where that practice happens.

Last week we named the need to get your hiring process set-up so that you can identify and hire the people who do this. Today we’re talking about what to do with the people you’ve already hired who don’t.

Start by identifying the non-strategic thinkers. If any of the below resonate with things you have thought or said, you know who they are:

“My employee does exactly what I asked — but it somehow completely misses the point; it’s technically correct, but it’s useless. What is going on?”

“They bring me every problem but zero thinking. They come in and dump it on my desk and wait. No options. No analysis. No recommendation. Just: “What should I do?”

“Their project hits a wall and they are genuinely surprised. How? That was the most obvious risk in the room.’

“When I ask ‘what else did you consider?’ I get a blank look.”

You know who they are, so what do you do next?

“I keep telling them to think more strategically, but nothing changes. It’s like they don’t ‘get it’?”

Nearly all of us have tried this move, and found that “nothing changes” 100% of the time.

And it never will.

Telling someone to “think more strategically” is like teaching someone to swim by describing water or handing them a violin and saying “play with more feeling” when they don’t even know how to hold it.

The problem isn’t effort — it’s conditions.

Strategic thinking isn’t a skill you can lecture into someone. Telling people to “think bigger” or “zoom out” is about as useful as telling someone to “be more creative.” This is all just frustration dressed up as feedback. What you are really saying is “I’m frustrated with what you’re doing and how you do it.”

Strategic thinking is developed through exposure, practice, and reinforcement – not through closing your eyes and tapping your toes together 3 times.

If you want your people to think more strategically, you need to build the conditions that make strategic thinking possible.

We will address this topic over two newsletters, and this is the first. Here’s the full framework we’ll cover:

1. Start with the mindset shift

2. Give visibility into strategy

3. Assign strategic challenges

4. Build skills through tools and frameworks

5. Use coaching and reflective questions

6. Give feedback on strategic thinking

7. Make strategic reflection a habit

In this article, we’ll dig into the first three — the foundational conditions.

1. Start with the Mindset Shift

Most employees operate from a simple question: What do I need to get done today?

Strategic thinkers ask a different question: What matters most for the bigger goal?

This isn’t a personality trait. It’s a habit — and habits can be shaped.

Your job is to interrupt the task-completion default and replace it with strategic curiosity. You do this through the questions you ask, repeatedly, until they start asking them without you.

Try these in your next 1:1:

• “How does this task connect to our larger goals?”

• “What’s the long-term impact if this goes well? If it doesn’t?”

• “What would you do differently if you had twice the time? Half the time?”

The goal is to build the muscle of pausing before executing — asking why this and why now before diving into how.

(If you’ve been following this series, you’ll recognize this as the Pause Protocol applied to development: Pause–Breathe–Think–Choose. You’re teaching them to pause.)

2. Give Visibility Into Strategy

People can’t think strategically if they don’t know what the strategy is.

This sounds obvious, but it’s remarkable how often leaders expect strategic thinking from people who have no line of sight into strategic decisions. They’re executing in a fog, then getting dinged for not seeing the big picture.

If you want strategic thinkers, give them access:

• Include them in strategic conversations — even as observers. Let them see how decisions get made, what tradeoffs get weighed, what information leaders use.

• Share the documents — strategy decks, OKRs, board presentations, planning memos. Context changes how people think.

• Debrief your decisions — “Here’s what we decided and here’s why.” This is one of the fastest ways to transfer strategic thinking: narrate your reasoning out loud.

The goal is to move them from “I do what I’m told” to “I understand what we’re trying to accomplish and can make judgment calls accordingly.”

3. Assign Strategic Challenges

Strategic thinking is a skill. Skills develop through practice as well as observation.

This means giving people work that requires strategic thinking, not just execution. The stretch is about the type of thinking the work demands.

Ideas you can try with a developing strategic thinker:

• Lead a small initiative with cross-functional implications

• Research and present on an emerging trend that could affect your team’s work

• Develop a proposal to improve a system, process, or workflow

• Analyze a past decision — what worked, what didn’t, what would you do differently

The key: be explicit about what you’re asking for. Don’t just assign the project. Say: “I’m not just looking for a deliverable. I want to see how you think through this — the tradeoffs you weigh, the options you consider, the questions you ask.”

Then actually evaluate that. If you only praise the output, you’ll only get output.

What’s Next

You’ve now laid the foundation: a mindset shift toward strategic questions, visibility into how strategy actually works, and stretch assignments that require strategic thinking.

But foundations crumble without reinforcement.

In Part 2, we’ll cover how to sustain and deepen strategic thinking through tools, coaching, feedback, and reflection habits: all the infrastructure that turns a one-time development effort into a lasting capability.

Your move this week:

Pick one person on your team who you wish thought more strategically. Choose one action from above:

• Ask a strategic question in your next 1:1

• Invite them to observe a planning meeting and debrief it with them

• Assign a small stretch project with explicit strategic expectations

Start there. See what shifts.

And we want to hear from you. Really we do.

If any of this landed with you—whether you’re in the thick of these challenges or you’ve developed strategies that work—we want to hear about it. We’re scheduling 20 minute conversations with leaders to understand what’s helping you stay grounded as a strategic operator and where you’re struggling. Your insights will shape how we build this series and similar future projects. Send us an email at Susannah@hookrodgersconsulting.com to get on the books.

It takes less than 10 minutes to complete, and we invite nonprofit staff, leaders, board members, and consultants to share their experiences. Your participation will help build a comprehensive picture of strategic practices across the sector, with findings to be published in early 2026. Please take the survey and share it with your network to help us gather diverse perspectives.

Now, back to the newsletter.

Is Your Hiring Process Screening Out Strategic Thinkers?

Building Your Strategic Operating System, Part 1

We’ve named the need to build a strategic operating system—the structures, rhythms, and decision-making infrastructure that make it possible to think long-term while executing in the short-term—but haven’t dug in much. Today, we begin the dig.

To start: operating systems aren’t just processes, they’re people.

A strategic operating system runs on strategic operators—people who default to thinking about context, tradeoffs, and second-order effects. People who naturally ask “why” before “how.”

Strategic thinking is more innate in some than others. It’s also trainable, but not quick.

I’ll save the science for a different article, but short story: strategic thinking involves complex brain networks and depends on the ability to engage both logical (left-brain) and intuitive (right-brain) processes to see patterns, anticipate outcomes, and plan for the future. Again, trainable, but the work of rewiring brains is not so quick.

The very best thing you can do for your strategic operating system is to add more of these “whole-brained” people who have been moving in the world as strategic operators long before you met them and will have an almost immediately outsized impact by just using their brains to do their job.

The problem is that most hiring processes are designed to screen these people out.

Below you’ll find:

• Specific examples of how our hiring processes might be keeping us from getting what we need the most.

• A list of indicators we refer to as the “How to Spot a Strategic Brain When It’s Right In Front Of You, and never let another one get away” list.

• And then, to end on a high note, we’ll review a set of red-flags that when (commonly) misread as impressive answers lead us to that dreaded place of eery confusion months later where we find ourselves trying to square the two following facts: 1. You did successfully recruit and hire that whole new batch of senior leaders 2. Absolutely zero has changed.

After you’re done reading:

• Check out our set of sample Interview Questions for Identifying Strategic Thinkers

• Go look through your hiring process documents and determine and then take the next appropriate action. Direct communication is the gold standard but if forwarding this article to a handful of your colleagues with just a note at the top that says “Interesting, what do you think?” is the most strategic option given the landscape within which you operate, then just hit send now, get on with your day, and reassess later.

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The pitfalls in most hiring processes (how we are getting it plain wrong):

We reward storytellers, not thinkers. “Tell me about a time when...” is the backbone of behavioral interviewing, and it’s terrible for identifying strategic thinkers. It favors people who’ve rehearsed polished narratives about their accomplishments. Strategic thinkers often give messier answers—they want to talk about context, tradeoffs, what they’d do differently now. Unless you are hiring for an in-front-of-the-camera position, listen to the strategic thinker, ask follow up questions and don’t default to the smooth talker with the tight story.

We screen for confidence and not insight. Strategic thinkers often hedge. They ask clarifying questions. They say "it depends." It's easy to mistake this for indecision or even insecurity, when it’s really critical nuance. Be careful not to reward performative certainty over real-time evidence of a disciplined, thorough, and adaptive strategic operator.

We mistake seniority for strategic capacity. Big assumption: if they’ve held senior roles, they must think strategically. Plenty of people get promoted for all manner of reasons; title is not any kind of proxy for how someone thinks.

We focus on what they’ve done, not how they would go about doing it. Most interviews focus on what someone has done and skip the questions that tell you how they did it or how they would do it. Try this prompt: “Here’s a problem you haven’t seen before—how would you think about it?” Listen and then probe. Get clear on what they can do by focusing on how they go about doing it.

Standard reference check questions don’t help. “Would you hire them again?” “What are their weaknesses?” These questions reveal nothing about how someone thinks. Ask about a project that didn’t go as planned and how the candidate handled it. Focus on how they responded and pivoted.

“Culture fit” can screen out the people you need the most. Strategic thinkers challenge assumptions. They ask uncomfortable questions. They push back. This often reads as “not a fit” or “difficult.” We hire easy joiners and then wonder why everything is basically the same 9 months later?

How to spot a strategic brain when it’s right in front of you, and never let another one get away:

Strategic thinkers leave signals all over interviews, because when someone’s default mode is to think before acting, it shows up in nearly every question they are asked.

Here are some of the ways you can spot a strategic operator:

They ask questions, a lot. About the role. About the organization. About your strategy. About the problem you’re trying to solve. About why you joined the team. About what you see as the hardest part of the work and the key strengths and weaknesses of the organization. And they will bring vigor to this because every answer is a set of data points that will help complicate their thinking in order to sharpen it. If you listen, you’ll often hear your answer come back to you by way of a surprising series of connected dots.

They ask clarifying questions or for specific examples before giving an answer. Instead of launching into a response, they will probe the question. “In this scenario when you refer to ‘leadership challenge,’ do you mean managing people or influencing without authority… or something else?” This isn’t avoidance or buying time, this is their discomfort in jumping to a conclusion or solving a problem before understanding it and their confidence in being able to really answer a question when they do.

They tell you about the win and the cost (and without hesitation, they will undercut their own win in service to a fully strategic assessment). They don’t just name the outcome or describe what happened, they talk about tradeoffs and context; they situate it in a broader frame. “We hit our number, but we burned out the team doing it—I wouldn’t run it the same way again.” Or: “We launched on time, but we cut scope in ways we’re still paying for.” Strategic operators evaluate outcomes while holding multiple variables and no strategic evaluation ever reveals just the upside.

This matters to you because strategic work is tradeoffs. If they can’t name the tradeoffs in their past work, they won’t see them in yours.

They say “it depends” and they mean it. Not as a dodge, but as a genuine reflection that context matters and that no thinking is does in a vacuum. Ask them what it depends on, and they will walk you through that with ease.

They self-reflect without being asked. Strategic thinkers did the post-mortem long before they walked into your interview. And it will always include a more than healthy does of feedback that have for themselves.

They volunteer what didn’t work without being prompted. Not in a self-flagellating way, but with the ease of someone who’s processed it and has an unflappable practice of strategic humility. They’re not defensive about failure because that would get in the way of what they want the most —another opportunity to extract learning.

They really do want your feedback. Strategic thinkers seek out feedback; they depend on it to refine their thinking now and moving forward.

Test this: give them real-time feedback on something during the hiring process and watch the reaction. Do they get curious or defensive? Were they grateful or annoyed? Did they immediately process it and then begin sharing their pivoted thinking without you having to ask? Or did they just kinda shut down?

They push back and challenge the premise. Not to be contrary, but because they’re actually engaging with the problem. “I’m not sure that’s the right framing—have you considered...?” This takes confidence, and it shows you how they’ll operate once they’re in the role. Neither you nor they want to keep doing things that don’t make sense.

They often take a beat to think before responding. Silence in an interview can feel awkward, but if you are interviewing a strategic thinker, silence is thinking. And you want thinking.

They will be deeply curious about things that appear to have nothing to do with their role or anything you have discussed.That’s not an indicator that they lack enthusiasm for the position they are being interviewed for. The opposite. When they are excited about the role, they will then seek to understand the system and context around it. They need to build a clean enough picture of the entire organization and the system they would operate in, in order to complete their assessment about the role. They get the thing we need everyone to get, that the work of an individual matters in so far as it connects to the work of others to drive a shared strategy toward progress.

Red-flags we misread as impressive:

What might make a candidate feel impressive to you might actually be an indicator that they fundamentally lack the ability to think strategically.

Overly polished stories with clean arcs. Real strategic work is messy. If every story has a tidy beginning-middle-end and a triumphant conclusion, they’re performing, not reflecting. People are trained to interview in this manner, so you as the interviewer might need to push them out of this model.

Every outcome was a win. No real reflection on mistakes. Either they haven’t done hard things, or they haven’t processed them honestly.

Confidence without nuance. Strong opinions, loosely held is a cliché—but confidence with nuance is the real signal. Beware the candidate who has answers for everything.

No questions about the bigger picture. If they’re not curious about where the organization is going, they’re probably not going to think strategically about their role in it.

They describe what they did, but not why. Execution without reasoning. They may have delivered results, but did they understand the strategy behind them?

“Learnings” that sound rehearsed. “I learned to communicate better” is not a learning. It’s a platitude. Push for specifics.

The Caveat

Hiring is only half the equation. Even if you hire a strategic thinker, they won’t stay strategic in a reactive environment. They will come in strong, try absolutely everything to make the system a strategic one, but when the system doesn’t change, they will get frustrated and ultimately burn out from the disconnect between the vision and the everyday work and the experience of working within a system that keeps them from utilizing their key strength.

That’s a topic for another article. But it’s worth naming here: if you keep hiring strong strategic thinkers and watching them become reactive operators within six months, the problem isn’t the people. It’s the system.

—----

Next Steps:

• Download the Interview Questions for Identifying Strategic Thinkers

• Now go look through your hiring process document and then do whatever is the next right strategic operator thing to do. You know best.

And we want to hear from you. Really we do.

If any of this landed with you—whether you’re in the thick of these challenges or you’ve developed strategies that work—we want to hear about it. We’re scheduling 20 minute conversations with leaders to understand what’s helping you stay grounded as a strategic operator and where you’re struggling. Your insights will shape how we build this series and similar future projects. Send us an email at Susannah@hookrodgersconsulting.com to get on the books.

Every meaningful decision you make as a leader happens under conditions of uncertainty. The 80/20 principle applies: you’re almost never going to have more than about 80% of the information you want. You can commission another report, schedule another meeting, wait another quarter—and you’ll still be at 80%. The certainty trap is spending your energy chasing that final 20% that may not even exist.

The trick isn’t to get more information. It’s to manage the uncertainty you’ve got.

That’s the real superpower. Not the ability to predict the future. The ability to move forward without needing to.

They won’t eliminate uncertainty. They’ll give you infrastructure for moving through it.

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Tool #1: The Uncertainty Audit

A practical uncertainty audit forces you to separate what you know from what you’re assuming.

The real value shows up in two places. First, it helps you identify which unknowns actually matter. Second, it reveals where you might be fooling yourself—where emotion, recent experience, or habit is doing the work that strategic thinking should be doing.

Finally, an uncertainty audit changes how you communicate decisions to others. Instead of presenting a conclusion as though it emerged fully formed from certainty, you can show your reasoning: here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t, here’s the bets we’re making and why.

Tool #2: The Reversibility Test

Before you decide how much deliberation a decision deserves, ask: Is this a one-way door or a two-way door? One-way doors—decisions that are expensive or impossible to reverse—warrant slower, more careful thinking. Two-way doors can be walked back through; decide faster, learn, adjust.

Most decisions are more reversible than they feel in the moment. Leaders often burn significant time and energy deliberating two-way doors as though they’re permanent, while under-examining the ones that actually are. The reversibility test helps you match your process to the actual stakes—and frees up operating capacity for the decisions that genuinely require it.

Two-way doors deserve speed and a review date. One-way doors deserve deliberation and input.

Tool #3: The Pre-Mortem

Assume the decision failed. Spectacularly. Now work backward: What happened?

This isn’t pessimism—it’s a structured way to surface what your current thinking is missing. Optimism bias is real; when we’re leaning toward a choice, we unconsciously downplay the ways it could go wrong. A pre-mortem gives your team explicit permission to name concerns that might otherwise stay unspoken.

The pre-mortem works because it changes the psychological frame. Instead of asking people to critique a plan (which feels like criticism), you’re asking them to explain why a hypothetical failure occurred (which feels like analysis). The shift is subtle but significant. Concerns that would feel disloyal or negative in a planning meeting become legitimate insights in a pre-mortem.

Tool #4: The Cheap Test

What’s the smallest move that would generate real information?

Under uncertainty, analysis has diminishing returns—at some point you’re just rearranging your assumptions. Action creates data. The discipline is designing experiments that are low-cost but high-signal: pilot programs, limited rollouts, conversations with the five people who’d be most affected.

A good cheap test has two characteristics: it’s actually cheap (in time, money, political capital, or attention) and it generates a real signal (not just confirmation of what you already believe). Before you run it, define what success and failure look like—and what you’ll do in each case. Otherwise you’ll end up rationalizing whatever result you get.

Building Your Decision-Making Infrastructure

These four tools work together as decision-making infrastructure: the uncertainty audit surfaces your thinking, the reversibility test calibrates how much deliberation the decision deserves, the pre-mortem stress-tests your blind spots, and the cheap test biases you toward learning through action.

You don’t need to use all four tools for every decision. The reversibility test alone might be enough to tell you this is a two-way door that deserves a quick call and a review date, not a week of analysis. A major strategic bet might warrant all four tools in sequence.

None of these tools promise certainty. All of them help you operate strategically without it. Build them into your system, and navigating uncertainty stops being something you white-knuckle through and starts being something you have a practice for.

Start Here

Pick one decision you’re currently facing—something meaningful enough to matter but not so high-stakes that you need to get it perfect on the first try. Run the uncertainty audit. Notice what surfaces when you separate what you know from what you’re assuming.

Download the worksheets for all four tools and keep them accessible. The goal is to build the muscle memory of thinking this way until it becomes your default.

Download the Decision-Making Toolkit:

• Uncertainty Audit Worksheet

• Reversibility Test Worksheet

• Pre-Mortem Worksheet

• Cheap Test Worksheet

Here’s an example of how the tools work together, summarizing the toplines from each step along with the filled out worksheet.

Example: Maya, an ED of a regional environmental advocacy org, who is deciding whether to expand into Ohio to support a pipeline fight.

Uncertainty Audit: Maya separates what she knows (has $150K, coalition asked for help, PA precedent) from what she’s assuming (coalition will work well, playbook transfers, funders will approve). She identifies which unknowns matter most and realizes she’s overweighting the PA win while underweighting team capacity.

Example-Uncertainty-Audit-Filled.docx

Reversibility Test: She realizes this isn’t one decision—it’s two. The exploration phase is a two-way door (decide fast). The full commitment is a one-way door (slow down, get input). This reframe lets her move quickly on the first stage while building in checkpoints.

Example-Reversibility-Test-Filled.docx

Pre-Mortem: The leadership team imagines spectacular failure—coalition implodes, wrong hire, funder pulls out, home state work suffers. They sort failure modes and identify three major changes: funder-first conversation, protected capacity for home state, and staged commitment with explicit kill switches.

Example-Pre-Mortem-Filled.docx

Cheap Test: Before committing, Maya designs a strategy session with the coalition—20 hours and $3K to test whether they’ll actually defer on regulatory strategy or just want her name and money. She defines what success and failure look like before she goes.

Example-Cheap-Test-Filled.docx

Strategic operators understand something that reactive leaders don’t.

Some wins create capacity. They build infrastructure, develop people, establish systems, strengthen relationships, or generate resources that compound over time. These wins make the next win easier. They create momentum.

Other wins deplete capacity. They extract energy, burn goodwill, create technical debt, or consume resources that aren’t replenished. These wins look good on this quarter’s scorecard but leave you weaker for the next challenge. They create a treadmill.

The tricky part is that both kinds of wins feel the same in the moment. Both give you that hit of accomplishment. Both show up on your to-do list as “done.” You can’t tell the difference by how productive you feel at the end of the week.

You can only tell the difference by what’s true six months later.

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A New Report Coming

But before getting to the rest of the article, please contribute to our survey!

We’re launching a Strategic Fitness Survey to understand how nonprofits make decisions and implement strategic thinking practices. It takes less than 10 minutes to complete, and we invite nonprofit staff, leaders, board members, and consultants to share their experiences. Your participation will help build a comprehensive picture of strategic practices across the sector, with findings to be published in early 2026. Please take the survey and share it with your network to help us gather diverse perspectives!

The Trap: We Keep Choosing Short-Term Wins

If the choice is so obvious when I lay it out like this, why do smart leaders keep making the wrong one?

Because the system rewards short-term wins.

Your board wants to see quarterly metrics. Your funders want deliverables on their timeline. Your staff want to know the crisis is handled. The win you can show today feels more real than the capacity you might build over the next year.

And here’s the part nobody tells you: sustainable success is invisible until it compounds. When you’re investing in capacity-building wins, you often can’t point to anything tangible for months. You’re building infrastructure that won’t be stressed until the next crisis. You’re developing people who won’t be ready for bigger roles until next year. You’re creating systems that won’t show their value until the tenth time you use them.

The short-term win is legible. The sustainable success approach requires faith that the compounding will happen.

That faith gets harder to maintain when you’re exhausted, when the inbox is screaming, when everyone around you is rewarding activity over impact.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let me make this concrete.

Scenario: Your communications director just resigned. You need to fill the role fast—there’s a major product launch (or campaign, or fundraising push) in eight weeks, and the board is already asking questions about the gap.

Short-term win approach: Hire quickly from your existing network. Get someone in the seat who can execute the launch. You don’t have time for a real search—you’ll deal with fit issues later. The important thing is showing the board you’ve handled it.

Sustainable success approach: Take a beat. Ask why the previous person left—and whether anyone bothered to find out before they walked out the door. Look at whether the role is scoped correctly or whether you’ve been asking one person to do three jobs. Consider whether the eight-week deadline is actually immovable or whether you’re just terrified to push back on stakeholders. Run a search that prioritizes finding someone who will build capacity, not just execute one launch.

The short-term win gets someone in the seat. It solves the immediate problem. It gives you something to report at the next board meeting. It feels productive.

The sustainable success approach might mean the launch happens a few weeks late—or that you adjust scope and have an honest conversation with your board about tradeoffs. But eighteen months from now, you have a communications director who’s built a team, established systems, developed a real strategy, and positioned you for growth you can’t even imagine yet.

I’ve seen this play out hundreds of times. The reactive leader makes the quick hire and spends the next year managing underperformance, filling gaps, apologizing to partners for dropped balls, and eventually doing another search. The strategic operator takes a short-term hit but creates long-term capacity.

A Necessary Nuance: When Short-Term Wins Are Part of the Strategy

I want to be clear: short-term wins aren’t the enemy. Sometimes they’re exactly what sustainable success requires.

The difference is whether the short-term win is the strategy or whether it’s in service of a strategy.

There are moments when you need a quick win to buy credibility with a skeptical board. Times when your team needs a visible success to rebuild momentum after a hard loss. Situations where demonstrating early results is what unlocks the resources for longer-term investment. Political realities where you have to show progress before you’ve earned the capital to make bigger moves.

Strategic operators understand this. They’re not allergic to short-term wins—they’re intentional about them. They can articulate why this particular win matters, what it’s building toward, and how it connects to the larger picture. They know when they’re making a tactical choice to bank a quick result and when they’re genuinely building something.

The trap isn’t pursuing short-term wins. The trap is pursuing them by default —letting urgency dictate your choices because you’ve never built the infrastructure to do anything else. It’s the difference between a chess player sacrificing a piece as part of a larger strategy and a chess player losing pieces because they’re only thinking one move ahead.

When you find yourself chasing a short-term win, ask: Am I choosing this, or is it choosing me?

The Test

When you’re about to commit significant time, energy, or resources to something, pause and ask:

Building the Infrastructure for Long-Term Thinking

Strategic operators don’t magically resist short-term pressure. They build infrastructure that makes long-term thinking possible.

They create space for strategic reflection. Not occasional retreats—regular rhythms where they step back and ask whether the wins they’re chasing actually ladder up to the outcomes that matter.

They name their non-negotiables. They’re clear about what they won’t sacrifice for a short-term win—what investments in people, systems, or relationships are protected even when the pressure mounts.

They track leading indicators, not just lagging metrics. They pay attention to capacity measures—team health, system robustness, relationship depth—not just outcome measures like revenue or deliverables.

They get comfortable with temporary underperformance. Building capacity sometimes means accepting slower progress in the short term. Strategic operators can explain why a dip today enables acceleration tomorrow.

The Pattern to Break

Here’s what I see over and over with the leaders I work with: They know the difference between short-term wins and sustainable success. They can articulate it clearly. They agree with everything I’ve written here.

And then Monday morning arrives.

The inbox explodes. A crisis demands immediate response. A funder asks for something yesterday. A board member has an urgent concern.

And they make the short-term choice. Not because they don’t know better—because the pressure is real and the infrastructure for resisting it doesn’t exist.

The superpower isn’t knowing the difference. It’s building the muscle memory and the organizational scaffolding to choose sustainable success even when short-term wins are screaming for your attention.

Reflection Questions

Take fifteen minutes this week to sit with these:

• Think about the last three “wins” you celebrated. For each one: Did it build capacity, or did it deplete resources?

• What problem are you solving repeatedly—quarter after quarter, year after year—that signals you’re treating symptoms rather than causes?

• Where are you making short-term choices because you don’t have infrastructure to support a different decision?

• If you looked at your organization eighteen months from now, what capacity would you wish you had started building today?

Action Steps

1. Apply the Three Questions this week. Before you commit significant time or resources to anything, ask: Will this make the next thing easier? Are we solving this in a way that prevents recurrence? What will we have built when this is done?

2. Identify one capacity-building investment you’ve been postponing. What system, what hire, what process have you been putting off because the short-term pressure is too intense? Name it. Put a date on starting it.

3. Add one leading indicator to what you track. Pick something that measures capacity rather than output. Team morale. System uptime. Relationship health. Start paying attention.

4. Keep practicing the Pause Protocol. That 60-second reset creates space to ask whether you’re about to make a short-term choice or a sustainable one. Use it before committing to anything significant.

5. Join our Strategic Fitness Benchmarking Study.

We’re asking consultants, leaders, staff, and board members to assess strategic fitness inside nonprofits: How often do teams pause, ask the right questions, map systems, dig for root causes, run scenarios, and name stakeholders early?

We’ll publish a report with practical benchmarks based on organizational size and field, plus a collection of industry-sourced tools and practices.

Fill out the survey and add your thoughts here.

Can't wait? Jump into the survey!

The State of Strategic Thinking in Nonprofits

We’ve been thinking about strategic thinking lately. Obviously, because we’ve sent you lots of newsletters about it.

And it sounds redundant, but we mean it. We’ve been observing how nonprofits make decisions: how they choose what to do next, and how they decide when something isn’t working.

What we see is that most nonprofits care deeply about their work. They want to make good decisions. They want to focus on what matters. But the actual mechanics of strategic thinking, the habits and practices that lead to clarity and good choices, are all over the map.

Some organizations ask “what change will this create?” before launching a program. Others skip that question until they’re already knee-deep in implementation. Some pause mid-project to check if they’re solving the right problem. Others keep moving forward because stopping feels like failure.

We don’t think this is about smart people versus less-smart people. We think it’s about which habits have taken root in an organization and which haven’t.

Introducing Our Strategic Fitness Survey

So we’re launching a survey to figure out what’s actually happening out there, and it will culminate in a report we will release early in 2026.

Take the survey

The survey asks about the behaviors that we think signal strategic fitness. We’ll be seeking data on questions such as:

• Whether teams define the outcome they want before jumping into action.

• Whether they consider how different parts of their work influence each other.

• Whether they look for leverage points instead of just working harder.

• Whether strategic decisions get enough time and attention or get rushed.

We want to understand the current state. What’s common practice? What’s rare? And most importantly, do these habits connect to better outcomes?

The survey takes less than 10 minutes. It’s for nonprofit staff, leaders, board members, and consultants who work in the social sector. There are about a dozen questions about strategic behaviors, more about Board and leadership alignment and communications, questions about about how decisions actually play out, and a handful of open-ended questions where you can share what you’re experiencing.

What We’ll Do With Your Responses

We’re not trying to grade anyone. Our objective is to create a baseline, see patterns, and identify what separates organizations that feel strategically fit from those that feel stuck.

We’ll gather responses through the end of the month. Then we’ll analyze the data and release a report in early 2026. The report will describe what we found, identify different approaches to strategic thinking, and offer some practical starting points based on where an organization currently stands.

We have a favor to ask.

First, if you work in or with nonprofits, please fill out the survey. Your responses will help us all understand the landscape better.

Take the survey

Second, share the survey with others! Post it on LinkedIn. Forward it to your network. Send it to your board chair or your executive director. We want to gather at least 50 responses to make this meaningful, and the more diverse perspectives we gather, the more useful the report will be.

Building a Collective Understanding of Strategic Practices

We’ve spent years working with nonprofits on strategy. We’ve seen what happens when strategic thinking is strong and when it’s weak. But we’ve never had data that shows the full picture across the sector. This survey is a chance to build that picture together.

Thanks for being part of this journey with us. If you’ve missed any of our previous newsletters in this series, you can find them in our archives, starting with our introduction to the Strategic Agility Reboot and continuing through our practical tools like the Pause Protocol.

Looking forward to the next phase of our series!

Sam and Susannah

We started this series talking about the foundational muscle of a strategic operator: your ability to create space for intentional choice. This is where strategic operating begins, but it’s not enough. You need infrastructure for what comes next; infrastructure that supports a sound strategic operating system. Without this, the best strategic thinkers will still default to sophisticated reactivity, making smart tactical moves that don’t add up to strategic momentum.

This article breaks down that cognitive infrastructure into two toolkits: the Anticipation Toolkit for seeing what’s coming before it arrives, and the Navigation Toolkit for steering through uncertainty without losing your strategic thread. These are specific, learnable skills that change how you process complexity, map implications, and navigate uncertainty in real time. And what’s really cool is we’ll do it through scenarios.

We’ll tackle execution infrastructure — the systems that translate strategic decisions into operational reality — in a later article. For now, we’re focused on the thinking and decision-making skills that separate strategic operators from everyone else who’s just working really hard and hoping it adds up to something.

When Instinct Isn’t Enough

The airport book version of my tagline speaks to the 20+ years I’ve spent in executive and management positions. But the real tagline is about the strategic boot camp I’ve been in for the past 6 years: milestones marked by deafening hammer blows of parenting.

The contexts look different — one involves quarterly projections and stakeholder management, the other involves bedtimes and screen time negotiations — but the emotional experience is identical.

You’re making consequential choices with incomplete information, watching for signals that might mean everything or nothing, second-guessing yourself at 2am, and wondering if the path you chose today will reveal itself as wise or foolish five years from now. Whether you’re deciding to restructure a department or whether to let your kid quit piano, the gnawing question is the same.

The answer, unfortunately, is also the same: you don’t, you won’t, but you can make the best possible decision, most of the time.

What we all really want is to feel confident that we are making the right decisions, or at least the best decisions possible given what we know, most of the time. Not perfect decisions. Not decisions that never need adjustment. Just the consistent ability to look at complex situations and choose paths that actually advance your objectives instead of creating new problems you’ll spend months (or years) untangling, paying for, or, in the case of your child, a lifetime hearing about.

Wheel-spinning at work (or with kids) is frustrating, exhausting and demoralizing, but it’s unsound decision-making that we are (and should be) most scared of. And the real pain is that most bad decisions don’t feel bad at the moment. They feel necessary, urgent, obvious — until the downstream effects start showing up, you realize what you missed, and then you look for the closest wall to bang your head on or the nearest window to throw your computer out of.

The Need For Infrastructure

The difference between leaders who consistently make sound decisions under pressure and those who don’t isn’t intelligence or experience. It’s infrastructure.

Strategic operators rely on a cognitive operating system — systematic ways to anticipate what’s coming and navigate uncertainty — that works at speed and scale. Without this infrastructure, you can’t maintain strategic perspective when decisions are coming fast or when you’re managing complexity across multiple initiatives simultaneously.

You revert to pattern-matching and instinct. And while pattern-matching and instinct can serve you well — even the best leaders rely on them — they only get you so far. Pattern-matching works until you encounter a situation that doesn’t match your previous patterns.

Instinct serves you until the context shifts in ways your gut hasn’t calibrated for. Strategic operating requires more than good instincts. It requires systematic thinking that helps you see what instinct alone will miss.

The Anticipation Toolkit: Skills for Seeing Around Corners

These skills help you map what’s coming before it arrives — not through prediction, but through systematic thinking about implications, vulnerabilities, and how systems respond to change.

For each skill, we’ve linked a scenario for how this plays out in your work-life.

Trade-offs and downstream effects is really three interconnected skills that teach you to map decision space in three dimensions. Risks show you what you’re vulnerable to. Trade-offs surface what you’re giving up with each choice. Downstream effects trace how your decision ripples through the system over time. Together, they keep you from making choices based only on what’s visible in the immediate moment.

Check out the scenario here.

Inversion is the practice of approaching problems backward—instead of asking “how do we succeed?”, asking “how would we definitely fail?” This skill reveals blind spots and unstated assumptions that forward-thinking misses entirely. Strategic operators use inversion to stress-test their plans by identifying all the ways things could go wrong, then working backward to prevent those failures.

Check out the scenario here.

Second and third order thinking takes you beyond the immediate consequence of a decision to map what happens next, and what happens after that. First-order thinking stops at “if we do X, Y will happen.” Strategic operators push further: “and when Y happens, what does that trigger? And when that triggers, what systemic shift does it create?” This skill keeps you from winning battles that lose you the war.

Check out the scenario here.

Root cause thinking is what separates people who solve symptoms from people who solve problems. It’s the discipline of asking “why” until you get to the structural issue creating the pattern you’re trying to change. In anticipation mode, root cause thinking helps you see what’s actually driving the dynamics you’re responding to—so you’re not building strategy on top of misdiagnosed problems.

Check out the scenario here.

The Navigation Toolkit: Skills for Moving Through Uncertainty

These skills help you steer when circumstances shift—making deliberate choices about what to preserve, what to abandon, and how to maintain strategic momentum when your original plan meets reality.

Backup plans and contingency strategies separate hope from strategy. Strategic operators don’t just have a plan A—they’ve identified the specific triggers that would signal plan A isn’t working, and they’ve pre-built the pivots they’d execute in response. This isn’t about pessimism; it’s about not being caught flat-footed when circumstances shift.

Check out the scenario here.

Sustainable success versus short-term wins is about distinguishing between outcomes that build capacity and outcomes that just look good on this quarter’s scorecard. Strategic operators know the difference between a win that creates momentum and a win that depletes resources. This skill keeps you from optimizing yourself into a corner.

Check out the scenario here.

Root cause thinking also serves navigation by ensuring you’re solving actual problems instead of managing symptoms. Without this skill, you’re constantly busy, constantly firefighting, and never actually fixing anything. In navigation mode, root cause thinking keeps you from repeatedly pivoting away from surface-level issues while the structural problem continues generating crises.

Check out the scenario here.

What This Looks Like in Practice

When you’ve developed these skills, your decision-making process changes fundamentally. You don’t need perfect information because you’re not trying to predict the future. You’re choosing the path that gives you the most strategic flexibility across multiple possible futures. You’re naming what you’re willing to risk, what you’re choosing not to do, and what chain reactions you’re setting in motion.

You’ve already inverted the problem to identify failure modes. You’ve traced second and third order effects to see where the decision leads three moves out. You’ve built contingencies for the scenarios that would actually threaten your objectives. You’ve diagnosed what’s actually causing the pattern you’re trying to change.

You stop being surprised by consequences you could have anticipated. You stop optimizing for metrics that don’t actually advance your goals. You stop solving the same problems repeatedly because you never addressed what was causing them. You stop getting caught without options when your initial plan hits reality.

You become someone who sees around corners—not because you’re clairvoyant, but because you’ve built the infrastructure to systematically think through implications before they become emergencies.

What’s Coming

Over the next several articles, we’ll do deep dives into each skill in the Anticipation and Navigation toolkits—what they are, how they connect, and how to use them to make better decisions under uncertainty.

Each article will give you specific frameworks and tools you can apply immediately and show you the common traps that keep strategic operators from seeing these elements clearly.

Once we’ve built out your anticipation and navigation capabilities, we’ll tackle the execution toolkit—the infrastructure that translates strategic decisions into operational reality. Because even the most brilliant strategic thinking means nothing if you can’t actually make it happen.

We want to hear from you!

If any of this landed with you—whether you’re in the thick of these challenges or you’ve developed strategies that work—we want to hear about it. We’re scheduling 20 minute conversations with leaders to understand what’s helping you stay grounded as a strategic operator and where you’re struggling. Your insights will shape how we build this series and similar future projects. Send us an email at info@hookrodgersconsulting.com if you want to schedule a conversation.

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This was my day last week on Thursday, and it sent me down a rabbit hole I’ve been in before, one that I think most of us fall into more often than we admit. We’re doing things. We’re busy. Our calendars are full. But somewhere along the way, we lost the thread connecting what we do to what we’re trying to achieve.

In the first two installments of this series, we talked about the Pause Protocol and self-evaluation. Those tools help you create space and identify patterns. What we want to talk about today is what happens in that space, what you do with those patterns once you see them.

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It comes down to one fundamental question: Why am I doing this?

Not in an existential sense. In a practical, outcome-focused sense. What am I actually trying to achieve? And how does this specific action get me there?

When I work with leaders, this is where things get uncomfortable. Because the honest answer is often “I don’t know” or “because it’s always been done this way” or “because someone expects it.”

What Susannah and I have learned is that there are tools that make this connection explicit. They’re not complicated. They don’t take hours. But they fundamentally shift how you spend your time.

The Strategic Time Audit

The Strategic Time Audit is diagnostic. It opens your eyes to where you’re spending time and whether those connections to outcomes are clear or just assumed.

We run this exercise two ways, depending on what feels more useful to you in the moment:

The first approach is retrospective. You track a week of time and then categorize time spent. Then step back and look at it: Does this connect to outcomes I care about or strategic priorities? Is that connection clear or is it something I’m assuming? Where am I spending time with no line of sight to any outcome at all? Fundamentally - does this make sense? Am I making strategic use of my time? Or am I simply maintaining systems and activities that exist for their own sake?

The second approach is prospective and honestly, we find it more revealing.

You go through your upcoming two weeks, day by day. For every meeting on your calendar, you ask three questions: Why am I in this meeting? What if I wasn’t? What would need to happen for me not to be?

You’ll discover some interesting stuff. We’ve had clients realize they’re in recurring meetings that used to matter but don’t anymore. The project ended six months ago but the meeting lives on. Or they’re in meetings where their presence is assumed but not necessary. Or worse, they’re in meetings that produce nothing for anyone.

One leader we worked with discovered she was spending eight hours a week in meetings that had no clear connection to any outcome she cared about. Eight hours. That’s a full workday she got back just by asking the question.

The “So What?” Tool

The “So What?” tool is what keeps you honest once you’ve done the Time Audit. It becomes your regular practice for maintaining visibility.

At the end of each day or week, you look at your calendar and task list. Then you ask: So what? What outcome did this produce? What did this do to move my priorities forward? And critically: how much of my time was spent simply maintaining structures or activities that exist because “that’s how we do things” rather than because they serve our strategy?

It forces the connection to be explicit. Not what you did, but what it created. Not the activity, but the result.

We started doing this at the end of every Friday. It takes maybe ten minutes. And what changed is that we started to notice patterns we couldn’t see before. We could see which activities consistently produced outcomes and which ones just consumed time. We could see where we were making assumptions about impact that weren’t holding up.

The uncomfortable part is when you can’t answer the question. When you look at six hours of work and realize it produced nothing meaningful. But that discomfort is useful. It’s the signal you need to make different choices.

The “If I stopped doing this” Test

The third tool gives you a framework for making those different choices. For any recurring activity, you ask: if I stopped doing this, what outcome wouldn’t happen?

We use this test when we’re looking at commitments that feel heavy. The weekly update no one reads. The report that gets filed but never referenced. The meeting that fills time but produces no decisions.

What it reveals is how many things we do out of habit or obligation rather than strategic necessity. And once you see that clearly, you have options. You can stop doing it. You can delegate it. You can redesign it to actually produce the outcome you need.

We had a client who was producing a monthly dashboard for her leadership team. It took her four hours every month. When she ran the test, she realized no one was using it to make decisions. They glanced at it, filed it away, moved on. She stopped producing it. No one noticed. She got four hours a month back.

The WHY and HOW of it all

What these three tools are really doing is rebuilding something that gets lost in reactive mode. They’re helping you articulate both the WHY and the HOW.

The WHY is the outcome you’re trying to produce. Why this action matters. What it’s supposed to achieve.

The HOW is the mechanism by which this action produces that outcome. The logic. The theory of change.

Without both, you’re just doing stuff. You might be busy. But you can’t know if you’re being effective.

In reactive mode, we lose both. We do things because they’re urgent or expected or habitual. We can’t articulate how those things produce strategic outcomes. The connection is assumed or absent entirely.

The Strategic Time Audit forces you to examine the WHY. What outcome is this supposed to serve? Often, there’s no clear answer.

The “So What?” tool makes you articulate both. What outcome did this produce? How did my action create that result? It builds the muscle of seeing the connection.

The “If I stopped doing this” test puts both on trial. What outcome wouldn’t happen? How does this activity produce that outcome? It exposes weak or broken connections.

Real Example

We saw this play out with Sarah, a marketing director we worked with last year. She was had a department goal related to increasing digital engagement. Instead of immediately jumping to posting more content, she stepped back. She asked: what business outcome are we really after?

In asking that question, Sarah discovered that lead generation, not increased content was the right strategic focus. By shifting her focus to targeted content that drove sign-ups, she delivered three times better results with less effort. She wasn’t working harder. She was working on the right thing; operating strategically.

Questions worth asking

We’ll leave you with some questions that have been useful for us when we’re trying to connect actions to outcomes:

What’s one project you’re working on where you could clarify the why before the how?

How do you currently measure success? Are you tracking activities or actual outcomes?

And perhaps most importantly: What activities are you participating in that perpetuate structures disconnected from your strategic priorities? What would happen if you stopped showing up?

It’s worth writing down answers to these questions and not treating them rhetorically, because the answers tell you where to focus next.

Action Steps

Run a Strategic Time Audit this week. Pick the approach that feels most useful. Either track your time retrospectively or go through your upcoming calendar prospectively. See what you discover.

Join our Strategic Fitness Benchmarking Study. We’re asking consultants, leaders, staff, and board members to assess strategic fitness inside the organizations they’re connected to. How often do teams pause, ask the right questions, map systems, dig for root causes? We’ll publish a report with practical benchmarks and a collection of tools and practices you can use. Join the study by filling out the interest form here.

We want to hear from you!

If any of this landed with you—whether you’re in the thick of these challenges or you’ve developed strategies that work—we want to hear about it. We’re scheduling 20 minute conversations with leaders to understand what’s helping you stay grounded as a strategic operator and where you’re struggling. Your insights will shape how we build this series and similar future projects. Send us an email at info@hookrodgersconsulting.com if you want to schedule a conversation.

Take the Strategic Operator Self-Evaluation now to pinpoint exactly where your efforts will yield the greatest impact, transforming anxiety about performance into actionable insights that will elevate your strategic leadership and consulting practice.

From defensive to desperate: My relationship with feedback

I have a dark relationship with 360 evaluations: I want them to draw blood, and I can’t wait for it.

Earlier in my career, the anxiety leading up to seeing the results was almost crippling…for days ahead of time. And I would defend myself against the outliers—”I know who gave me that 2, and here’s why they’re wrong.” But somewhere along the way, that defensiveness gave way to something else: an urgent, almost desperate need to know the truth about how I actually show up. Not how I intend to. Not how I hope to. How I actually impact the people around me.

I now understand that my craving for feedback is nothing more than an anxiety management strategy; the thing that makes me crawl out of my skin more than anything else is that I could be spending my time and energy on things that don’t actually matter. That I’m tirelessly doing but not moving forward. That I’m a wheel-spinner; stuck in patterns I cannot see and therefore, cannot change.

There’s a spectrum of intensity, sure, but I’m confident none of us are thrilled about wheel spinning.

Over time, what I have come to understand is that while feedback from others is critical - ongoing self-assessment is foundational. It’s useful to know that your staff think of you as a “strategic leader” or rank you 9/10 on approachability - but as a coach of mine once told me “stop performing competence and start examining reality.” (She was direct in her approach which aligned with my aforementioned coping strategy.)

If you want to fundamentally shift how you operate every day, at work (and in life), you have to treat ongoing evaluation of yourself against the operating must-haves, like coming home.

Because you can’t strengthen a muscle you haven’t located. You can’t close a gap you haven’t identified. And you can’t measure progress without a baseline.

Strategic Agility Reboot #2: Self-Evaluation as the foundation for becoming a more adept strategic operator

In the first article, we named thinking and acting with strategic intent as the underpinning of strategic operating and rolled out the Pause Protocol as an every-day forcing mechanism.

Today’s Strategic Reboot installment follows the same throughline of “with intent,” and focuses on building your foundation as a strategic operator centered around consistent self-evaluation against the must-haves of strategic operating.

Linked below is the Strategic Operator Self-Evaluation which focuses on your personal behaviors and patterns as a strategic operator—not your team’s performance or your organization’s systems. It shows you, in specific behavioral terms, where you need to focus. It turns “I’m struggling” into “I scored 6/20 in Strategic Discipline, which means I rarely know my priorities, almost never stop unproductive work, and consistently make decisions based on urgency rather than strategy.“ Uncomfortable and worth gold.

This tool offers a strategic approach to developing your strength as a strategic operator: in 15 minutes you will establish your current baseline, identify and diagnose gaps, and then make a intentional choice about ONE thing to course-correct. You focus on that for 30 days and then you step-back and return to reassess.

The goal isn’t to score perfectly; it’s to identify where you are now and what specific shifts will make the biggest difference.

Strategic operating isn’t about overhauling everything. It’s about identifying a strategic leverage point—a shift that will create the most relief and momentum right now.

Superpower #2: The Strategic Operator Self-Evaluation

Because you can’t strengthen a muscle you haven’t located. You can’t close a gap you haven’t identified. And you can’t measure progress without a baseline.

Take the Self-Eval here.

Action Steps

1. Click here and take the Strategic Operator Self-Evaluation.

2. Join our Strategic Fitness Benchmarking Study:

We’ll ask consultants, leaders, staff, and board members to assess strategic fitness inside nonprofits they are connected to: How often do teams pause, ask the right questions, map systems, dig for root causes, run scenarios, and name stakeholders early?

We’ll then publish a report offering practical benchmarks based on organizational size and field, guidance for how to use them, and a collection of industry-sourced tools and practices that you can use and take back to your teams.

Join the study by filling out the (30-second) interest form here.

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We want to hear from you

If any of this landed with you—whether you’re in the thick of these challenges or you’ve developed strategies that work—we want to hear about it. We’re scheduling 20 minute conversations with leaders to understand what’s helping you stay grounded as a strategic operator and where you’re struggling. Your insights will shape how we build this series and similar future projects. Send us an email at info@hookrodgersconsulting.com if you want to schedule a conversation.

Hi everyone! I’m happy to introduce a mini-series on the Chorus Consultant Community substack that is launching today. It’s all about strategy and how to cultivate the art and science of strategic thinking within ourselves, our organizations, and our clients.

For this series, my longtime friend and colleague, Susannah Hook-Rodgers, is joining me as an author for this substack. I’ve known Susannah since 2007 when she was a Green Corps field organizer and I was an Assistant Organizing Director. In nearly 20 years of partnership and collaboration, I’ve never stopped being in awe of Suannah’s brilliance, empathy, kindness, commitment to social change, and work ethic. I’m not alone in thinking that; Suannah has held executive team roles at Indivisible, MoveOn, Courage Campaign, Citizen Engagement Lab, and more.

The Strategic Agility Reboot series will run here every week for the next 3-4 months. We’ll keep to the Tuesday/Thursday newsletter schedule, with one day per week being the usual stuff here and the other day part of the Strategic Agility Reboot series. Sometimes I’ll share a byline with Susannah, other times she’ll be coming to you solo.

I’m really excited for all the great writing and resources we have queued up. I think you’ll love it. Now, over to Susannah for the inaugural piece.

Welcome to the Strategic Agility Reboot series

Practical tools and simple practices to reground as a strategic operator and build strategic stability around you.

Subscribe now

How we got here

Leadership is hard. And powerful, rewarding, and at times, exhilarating. It isn’t just what you do — it’s somehow, fundamentally, who you are.

Leaders move with intention. We do good work and feel good doing it, stabilized by strategy. We set others up to do the same. New information doesn’t derail us — it energizes us. We absorb, recalibrate, and move forward with sharper clarity. The unknown and difficult questions excite us. We trust our processes, our systems, our people, and ourselves.

Momentum builds. Strategic thinking, decisions, and actions compound, scale, and adapt. Our team operates with laser focus and we lead with grounded power toward progress and impact.

But then reality hits. Chaos. Urgency. A million things throw us off course and disrupt our clarity. Anxiety grows from the persistent sense of motion without progres — and worse, the guilt of watching our teams fill the vacuum with their best guesses, colleagues recalibrate without clear direction, and staff wonder what their work ladders up to.

I’ve worked with incredible leaders throughout my 20+ years in-house. Two years ago, I started my own practice to focus on what matters most to me: helping leaders and emerging leaders develop more effective leadership strategies. Each person comes through the door with their own presenting issue — ’I need to fix team dysfunction,’ ‘I want to roll out this new initiative,’ ‘I want to be more effective.’ But regardless of what brings them in, how many years of experience they have, or the size of their staff or budget, we invariably end up working on the same underlying capacity: their ability to operate as a proactive strategist, and whether the operating system around them enables or constrains that.

Here’s what I’m hearing when we start to dig in: Your day is full before it starts. Your inbox triggers panic. Your to-do list has replaced intention and screams, ‘Your value is measured by your output.’ Strategy slipped — you’re not sure when or how. Campaigns that plateaued six months ago are still consuming resources. Underperformance has become normalized. Decisions are now driven by fear, conflict avoidance, and ‘the way things have always been done.’ You know what needs to happen, but there’s no time. Even your best work feels fragile.

These leaders are strong strategists who worked hard to get where they are — they’re not struggling because they lack skill or discipline. They’re struggling because they’re trying to lead at speed without a system built for it. Trapped in the urgent and immediate, the absence of a strategic operating system that stabilizes their role as a proactive strategist compounds daily. And so do the costs.

My job is to help leaders reground as strategic operators and build systems that provide strategic stability and clarity — so they can do good work, feel good about it, and set others up to do the same.

Strategic operating takes time and intent. It’s not a straight line, it’s a way of being that drives how we operate: think, decide, build, and adapt.

That’s why we’re building this series: each week, we’ll provide practical tools and simple practices that don’t take more time but change how you use it.

Throughout this series, you’ll get:

• Practical “superpowers”: outcome focus, anticipation, long-term balance, better decisions, root-cause fixes, purpose-led leadership.

• A strategic thinking evaluation with a diagnostic guide and guidance for what to do based on the results.

• A bundle of tools, each one usable in <30 minutes.

Superpower #1

Strengthening the foundational muscle of a strategic operator – your ability to create space for intentional choice so that you can think and act strategically even when everything feels urgent. You can do this in less than 60 seconds and can start using it immediately.

The Pause Protocol

The next time you’re about to fire off an email, walk into another meeting, or feel urgency rising—stop. And run the protocol:

Pause. Don’t think, don’t speak, don’t type.

Breathe. Or move your body, whatever works to create space between stimulus and reaction.

Think. Ask yourself: “What outcome am I really after?”

Choose. Decide on an action (or in-action) based on what immediate next step will move you toward it.

What you’ll notice:

• Alignment; your action aligns with the direction you want and need to go.

• Relief; you feel better. Reactive urgency turns you into a machine.

• Empowerment; intentional action turns you back into a leader.

• Others shift. One person’s commitment to operate differently can disrupt the system around them.

Action Steps

Download the Pause Protocol Reminder Card here. Hang it up on your bulletin board, tape it to your desk, make it your screen saver.

Join our Strategic Fitness Benchmarking Study:

We’ll ask consultants, leaders, staff, and board members to assess strategic fitness inside nonprofits they are connected to: How often do teams pause, ask the right questions, map systems, dig for root causes, run scenarios, and name stakeholders early?

We’ll then publish a report offering practical benchmarks based on organizational size and field, guidance for how to use them, and a collection of industry-sourced tools and practices that you can use and take back to your teams.

—> Join the study by filling out the (30-second) interest form here.

Coming up next in the series

The next step is a Strategic Thinking Self Evaluation, with a diagnostic guide and an action plan based on your results.

The goal: to meet you where you are and give you a clear path forward—not a framework, but a targeted plan that works to address specific gaps.

We want to talk to you!

If any of this landed with you — whether you’re in the thick of these challenges or you’ve developed strategies that work — we want to hear about it. We’re scheduling 20 minute conversations with leaders to understand what’s helping you stay grounded as a strategic operator and where you’re struggling. Your insights will shape how we build this series and similar future projects. Reach out directly at info@hookrodgersconsulting.com to meet with Sam and me and discuss.