Strategy in Practice Paper 3: Activity Mistaken for Strategy
Updated: May 1
Systems rarely fail because they are inactive. They fail because they are busy in the wrong direction.
When alignment is poor, activity rarely reduces. It accelerates.
The result is a system that can demonstrate effort with precision, while losing clarity on whether anything is improving.
The shift from alignment to activity
During the Vietnam War, the United States lacked neither the strategy, intent, or resources. What became impossible to determine was whether any of it was working. When progress cannot be measured directly, systems default to measuring activity.
Measures of success focused on what could be counted. Missions completed. Territory engaged. Enemy losses.
As the war progressed, reporting increasingly relied on quantifiable proxies for success, most notably “enemy killed in action”, because they were comparable, reportable, and easy to brief.
That measurement regime aligned with an attrition logic: if progress is defined as reducing enemy capability, then counting losses becomes the most visible indicator of movement.
Historians have since highlighted the weakness in that link. Gregory A. Daddis describes how metrics can substitute for understanding, encouraging organisations to optimise for what can be shown rather than what matters.
Lewis Sorley similarly notes the tension between statistical success and the political realities of control, legitimacy, and security.
The system could demonstrate effort with precision. The link to outcomes weakened.
When the scorecard improves, but the experience does not, the system is optimising for visibility, not impact.
Activity increased. Clarity did not.
What this looks like in modern systems
When alignment is poor, activity fills the space. New programmes are launched. Initiatives are added. Reporting increases. Meetings multiply. Delivery plans expand.
Each action is individually rational. Collectively, they create drift.
None of it feels unreasonable. That is precisely the problem. When everything is a priority, activity expands and impact fragments.
A common example is the escalation of assurance. A service under pressure responds with recovery plans, dashboards, deep dives, and programme governance. Each layer adds visibility. Each consumes time.
Over time, organisations become highly effective at producing artefacts of control, slides, RAG ratings, and action logs, while the capacity to change the underlying pathway reduces.
Oversight increases fastest where capacity is already thinnest. Activity becomes a proxy for progress.
From the outside, the system appears responsive. From the inside, it feels overloaded.
The experience on the ground
For staff, this shows up as competing demands. Multiple priorities sit alongside each other. Everything matters. Very little stops. Time is split across delivery, reporting, transformation, and assurance.
The result is not inactivity. It is saturated.
For patients, the effect is less visible but just as real. Services continue to operate, but coordination does not consistently improve. Pathways remain complex. Variation persists.
The system is active. The experience does not fundamentally change.
It rarely feels like strategy has failed. It feels like there is too much to do.
Why does activity take over
This is not a failure of effort. It is a structural response. When systems cannot align around a small number of priorities, they default to doing more. Activity is visible. It creates evidence of action. It signals control.
There are clear drivers:
multiple stakeholders with legitimate priorities
distributed accountability
limited ability to stop existing work
pressure to demonstrate progress
In that context, adding activity feels safer than removing it. It avoids conflict and defers prioritisation.
But it converts strategic ambiguity into operational saturation.
Measurement and the illusion of progress
As activity increases, measurement adapts. What gets measured shifts towards what can be tracked consistently: outputs and process compliance.
These measures are not wrong. They are not the point.
When organisations are judged primarily on outputs, they optimise for them:
milestones over meaning
coverage over effectiveness
reporting over redesign
visibility over impact
The illusion of progress is created when the scorecard improves while the lived experience stays broadly the same.
What is measured starts to shape what matters.
The cost of constant activity
Sustained activity without clarity has consequences.
For staff:
cognitive overload
reduced capacity to prioritise
increased reliance on workarounds
Poor practice becomes normal
For organisations:
fragmented delivery
reduced impact of individual initiatives
difficulty sustaining change
reduced returns from extra capacity
For patients:
inconsistent experience
continued need to navigate the system
limited sense of improvement over time
stress
None of this reflects a lack of commitment. It reflects a system trying to respond without making trade-offs.
What would need to change
If activity is mistaken for strategy, the response is not to do more. It is to remove work deliberately. If every initiative can justify its existence, the system is already out of control.
Leaders are not judged by how much the system is doing, but by what they are willing to stop.
Focus is a strategic decision, not an operational constraint.
This requires stopping work that does not contribute to the outcome, not just adding more alongside it.
This means:
stopping or merging work that does not serve core priorities
treating outputs as signals, not endpoints
pairing activity with a small number of outcome tests
reducing reporting where it does not improve delivery
The simplest check is capacity. If time released from reporting and initiative management is not reinvested into delivery, the system has changed its paperwork, not its performance.
The connection back to alignment
This is not a separate issue. It is a consequence of the first paper.
When systems are not aligned, they compensate with activity. As activity increases, alignment becomes harder.
Misalignment drives activity. Activity obscures misalignment.
Conclusion
The Vietnam War is often examined through escalation, more resources, more effort, more activity. It also reveals a deeper problem: when the most visible indicators are not the outcomes that matter, systems can become increasingly productive without becoming more effective.
Modern systems face the same risk. They can multiply initiatives and strengthen assurance, yet still fail to change the lived experience.
Being busy is not the same as being effective.
Strategy does not fail through lack of effort. It fails when effort becomes detached from outcome.
Some of the reading that helped shape these thoughts
Gregory A. Daddis (2011): No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War
Lewis Sorley (1999): A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam
The Pentagon Papers (1971, declassified)
U.S. Department of Defense: Statistical Data on Vietnam War
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