Why your team feels like it’s running in circles—and how to turn “friction” into real alignment.
A few days ago, I spoke with Marcos, the CEO of a fast-growing B2B company.
Marcos had just spent $600,000 MXN on his annual strategic offsite. “It was a total success,” he told me. “Everyone walked out applauding, fully aligned with the vision.”
Six weeks later, he called again. His voice was different.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” he said, sounding genuinely exhausted. “I just left a product meeting where they presented progress on features no one can explain who requested—while our offsite strategy was to design for F500 companies. At the same time, marketing is spending the entire budget on campaigns for SMBs.”
He paused. “I feel like I spend my days preaching. Like I have to resell the strategy every Monday morning. Is it my team, or is it me?”
The answer: neither.
The problem wasn’t his team (they’re top-tier people) or his leadership (he’s a strong leader).
The problem was the document they created at that offsite.
This wasn’t an execution issue—it was a clarity issue built into the strategy itself.
Without realizing it, Marcos had approved a Paper Strategy: a document designed to achieve consensus (keeping everyone happy) but lacking the bets and trade-offs required for day-to-day execution.
When a strategy cannot eliminate 10 “good ideas” to choose 3 “winning bets,” dilution is guaranteed. Your strategy turns into an invitation to chaos, not a filter.
Why This Matters: The Financial Cost of Misalignment
What Marcos was experiencing isn’t a soft cultural issue.
It’s an active, measurable drain on profitability.
Every sprint spent building features nobody asked for was a direct subsidy to their F500 competitors.
Every month of alignment meetings was a month of lost market share.
The annualized cost of Strategic Friction in a mid-sized company exceeds $1,000,000 USD in rework, lost speed, and diluted resources.
Research backs this up:
95% of employees don’t know or don’t understand their company’s strategy (HBR).
67% of strategic initiatives fail in execution (PMI) because the strategy was ambiguous from the start.
The result is a measurable gap between intention (Marcos’ PowerPoint) and reality (his P&L).
The Diagnosis: What “Strategic Friction” Really Is
What Marcos described as “preaching” is actually Strategic Friction:
the invisible force that burns capital, time, and morale.
It’s the hidden tax created when a company operates with a Paper Strategy—a document that prioritizes inclusion over choice.
The Anatomy of a Paper Strategy
You probably have one if your strategic document:
1. Uses vague language
Filled with words like “best-in-class,” “optimize,” or “transform,” without metrics or timelines.
For Marcos’ product team, “Win Enterprise” was a slogan, not a specification.
2. Lacks a clear “No”
It includes every idea from the leadership team. Nothing was sacrificed.
3. Measures vanity, not impact
Focuses on outputs (“launch 10 features”) instead of outcomes (“increase Enterprise retention by 15%”).
This lack of clarity creates two massive, measurable P&L leaks.
Leak 1: The Resource Gap
This is the easiest cost to see.
In companies with high Strategic Friction, less than 40% of resources (time, money, people) are allocated to the top three priorities.
The other 60% disappears into:
• Zombie Projects
Initiatives that failed quarters ago but no one had the clarity or authority to kill.
• Ego Projects
Pet projects from powerful leaders—funded because of politics, not alignment.
• Parachute Projects
Because Marcos’ team didn’t understand what “designing for F500” required, they kept building for SMBs “just in case.”
Real impact:
It’s not just the $75,000 offsite.
It’s the $500,000 USD in engineering and marketing salaries burned in six months chasing the wrong customer.
Leak 2: The Friction Debt
This is the insidious cost—the cost of time.
Friction Debt is the tax you pay on every decision because the strategy didn’t make choices upfront.
The pattern:
Vague strategy: “Be the leader in innovation.”
Tactical decision emerges: prioritize the Developer API (scale) or the new UI (adoption)?
Forced debate: both teams argue their version of “innovation.”
Decision made by politics, not strategy.
Three weeks lost.
Meanwhile…
A competitor with a clear decision (“prioritize adoption”) made the call in 10 minutes.
They shipped, collected real data, and started v2.
By year-end:
Your team: 5 alignment meetings.
Competitor: 5 learning cycles.
This is what Marcos experienced as “herding cats.”
His teams ran in circles because the offsite didn’t give them decision rules—only aspirations.
The Alignment Stress Test (3 Steps)
1. The Hallway Test (30 seconds)
Stop 5 random employees. Ask:
“What are the company’s top three priorities this year?”
If you get 5 different answers (Marcos did), your strategy hasn’t permeated.
2. The Budget Test (60 seconds)
Open your project portfolio or OpEx budget.
Ask:
“Can I instantly map 100% of spend to the top three priorities?”
Any dollar that doesn’t map is a leak.
3. The “No” Test (1 minute)
Review last month’s leadership calendar.
Ask:
“How many good ideas were formally killed because they didn’t align with the strategy?”
If the answer is zero, your strategy has no teeth.
Real strategy is defined by what you choose not to do.
The Decision
If you failed this 3-minute test, your frustration is valid. This is not a communication problem—it’s a design problem at the core of your operating system.
You can treat Strategic Friction as the cost of doing business… or you can treat it as what it actually is:
the most expensive and avoidable design flaw in your operation.
The real win isn’t in your next offsite. It’s in building a system where strategy and execution finally become one.
If this resonates and you want to understand how to diagnose Strategic Friction inside your organization, reach out and we can explore it together: gerardo@astrolab.mx
