Most digital strategies are 60-page PowerPoints that nobody reads.
I have written a few of those. I have also been the consultant who watched a client present someone else’s strategy back to me three months later, having clearly read only the executive summary.
The problem with long strategies is that they are written for the wrong audience. They are written for the procurement function that bought them, not for the team that is meant to execute them.
A digital strategy that someone actually reads is short. Three pages, four if you must.
Page one: what we are doing and why
One paragraph on the business outcome the strategy is in service of. Three paragraphs on the digital changes that move that outcome. No more.
Page two: what we are stopping
The part most strategies leave out. If everything is a priority then nothing is. List two or three things you are explicitly going to stop doing or deprioritise. This is the page that creates the room for the new work to actually happen.
Page three: the next 12 weeks
Specific. Who is doing what, by when, with what success measure. Not “improve digital experience by Q3”. Specific.
If you have a fourth page, it is “what we will know in 12 weeks that we do not know now”. The discovery questions the strategy is partly designed to answer. This stops people pretending to have answers they do not have yet.
That is it. Strategies that look like this get read, get acted on and get updated. Strategies that look like 60-page PowerPoints get filed.
If your team has a strategy nobody is following, the issue is usually not the strategy, it is the format. Worth a conversation.