Strategy Isn’t a Deck

Strategy dies the moment it stays on the slide.

At Qantas, we’d been through wave after wave of redundancies following COVID. The only constant seemed to be the glossy recommendations from Accenture or Deloitte - each pointing to the next shiny thing. In the middle of all that churn, we had one strategy pack for the digital customer experience. It was meant to be our north star.

But here’s the thing: the people who wrote it weren’t going to live it.
They weren’t going to maintain the system, fight through the constraints, or make the dozens of messy decisions needed to get from vision to reality.

So we clung to that deck like a life raft in a sea of ambiguity. Every conversation circled back to the same slides: What about this? Have you thought about that? Where’s the detail? There wasn’t any. We were adrift, holding onto a promise written by people who’d already moved on.

That’s the trap.
A strategy deck can be sharp, articulate, inspiring—but it isn’t strategy. It’s an artifact. A placeholder. The real strategy lives in the choices you make every day, in the trade-offs you don’t want to make but must.

When a strategy is alive, you can feel it. The deck becomes just one of many tools, not the thing itself. The team knows the intent behind the slides. The decisions align because the story’s embedded in the people, not locked in PowerPoint.

A deck can hold a story, but only people can live it.