Towards Thick Strategy Narratives

In 1973, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz drew a distinction that should have changed how every strategist thinks, but mostly did not. In his essay "Thick Description," Geertz contrasted two ways of describing a human behavior - say, a wink. A thin description records the physical fact: the eyelid moved. A thick description captures the context, the intention, the cultural layer: it was a conspiratorial signal to a friend, referencing a shared joke, performed in a setting where such signals carry specific social weight.

Both descriptions are accurate. Only one is useful.

Strategy suffers from a chronic thinness problem. The deliverables of strategic planning - frameworks, matrices, two-by-twos, bullet-pointed "pillars" - are almost always thin descriptions of complex realities. They record what the eyelid did. They miss everything that makes the wink meaningful.

The Thin Strategy Trap

Consider a typical strategic plan. It might say something like: "We will grow revenue by 20% through geographic expansion and product innovation." This is thin. Dangerously thin. It tells you the direction of travel and nothing about the terrain. It cannot answer any of the questions that matter when things get complicated, which they always do.

Questions like: What do we do when expansion into the new market reveals regulatory barriers we did not anticipate? Which product innovations take priority when resources get constrained mid-year? How do we handle the tension between the expansion team's need for local autonomy and headquarters' desire for brand consistency? What does success look like if we achieve 12% instead of 20% - is that a strategic failure or a reasonable outcome given what we learned?

A thin strategy cannot answer these questions because it does not contain enough information. It is a skeleton without muscles, nerves, or skin. It can point in a direction but it cannot walk there.

What Thickness Looks Like

A thick strategy narrative is something different. It is not longer for the sake of being longer - bloated strategy documents are their own pathology. Thickness is about contextual density, not page count.

A thick strategy narrative includes:

The reasoning behind choices, not just the choices. Why geographic expansion and not deeper penetration of existing markets? What evidence, assumptions, and debates led to this decision? When the situation changes, people who understand the reasoning can adapt. People who only know the conclusion are stuck.

The tensions that remain unresolved. Every real strategy involves trade-offs that cannot be fully settled in advance. A thick narrative names them honestly. "We are betting on speed over thoroughness in the first phase, knowing this creates quality risk that we will need to address in Q3." This is not weakness. This is situational awareness.

Stories from the ground. Not case studies polished into corporate mythology, but specific, concrete examples of how the strategy plays out in practice. What did the sales team in the pilot market actually experience? What surprised them? What worked differently than expected? These stories carry information that no framework can encode.

The conditions under which the strategy should be abandoned. This is perhaps the most important element and the one most consistently missing. A thick narrative includes its own kill criteria. "If we have not achieved X by date Y, we should re-evaluate the entire approach." Without this, strategies become zombies - dead but still walking, consuming resources, resistant to termination.

Why Thin Wins (Temporarily)

If thick is better, why does thin dominate? Several reasons.

Thin is faster to produce. You can write a strategic framework on a whiteboard in an afternoon. A thick narrative requires weeks of research, conversation, and synthesis. In organizations that reward visible output over careful thought, the whiteboard wins every time.

Thin is easier to present. A two-by-two matrix fits on a slide. A nuanced narrative does not. The incentive structure of corporate communication - brief presentations to distracted executives - selects ruthlessly for thin.

Thin feels more certain. Frameworks project confidence. They have clean boxes and clear arrows. A thick narrative, with its acknowledged tensions and conditional statements, can feel wishy-washy to leaders who mistake certainty for competence. But certainty and accuracy are different things, and strategy that feels confident while being wrong is worse than strategy that feels uncertain while being honest.

The purpose of strategy is not to produce a document that looks decisive. It is to produce a shared understanding rich enough to guide action when the plan, inevitably, fails to predict reality.

The Narrative as Operating System

Here is another way to think about it. A thin strategy is like a set of GPS coordinates. It tells you where to go. A thick strategy narrative is like a detailed map combined with local knowledge - it tells you where to go, what the terrain looks like, where the difficult passages are, what the weather tends to do this time of year, and what the locals know that the mapmakers missed.

When the GPS signal drops out - and in complex competitive environments, it always does - the person with the thin strategy is lost. The person with the thick narrative can navigate by terrain, improvise routes, and make judgment calls that are informed by context rather than guesswork.

Boyd's OODA loop is relevant here. The orientation phase of the loop - the phase Boyd considered the heart of the entire cycle - is fundamentally about contextual richness. A fighter pilot orients not by consulting a checklist but by drawing on a deep reservoir of pattern recognition, situational understanding, and internalized knowledge about what this kind of situation tends to produce. That reservoir is thick. It is the opposite of a two-by-two matrix.

Organizations that want to operate at a high tempo need people at every level who can orient quickly and accurately. This is only possible when the strategic narrative is thick enough to have been genuinely internalized, not just memorized. People do not internalize bullet points. They internalize stories, reasoning, tensions, and concrete examples.

Building Thickness

How do you move from thin to thick? Not by writing longer documents, though the documents may end up longer. The shift is about process, not output.

Start with questions, not answers. A thick narrative emerges from genuinely grappling with hard questions. What do we not know? Where are we most likely to be wrong? What would a smart competitor do that we have not considered? If the strategy process is designed to produce predetermined conclusions - and many are - it will produce thin results regardless of effort.

Include dissenting voices. Thickness requires multiple perspectives. The person who disagrees with the strategy often holds information that the consensus is missing. Not always, but often enough that excluding them is a guaranteed thinness-producing move.

Revisit and revise. A thick narrative is a living document, not a monument. It should be updated as reality provides new information. The initial version is a hypothesis. Subsequent versions incorporate what you have learned. This is not indecisiveness. It is the strategic equivalent of the scientific method.

Tell stories. Abstract principles are thin. Concrete stories are thick. When explaining why a particular market matters, do not just cite the TAM figure. Tell the story of the customer you met there, what their problem looked like, why existing solutions failed them, and what it would mean for them if you got this right. That story carries strategic information that no spreadsheet can hold.

Strategy that cannot survive contact with reality was never strategy. It was decoration. The path toward strategies that actually work runs through thickness - through the hard, slow, sometimes uncomfortable process of building narratives rich enough to guide real decisions under real uncertainty.

It starts by caring more about the wink than the eyelid.

Related

• Thrust, Drag, and the 10x Effect - how reducing friction matters more than increasing force in strategic execution
• Daemons and the Mindful Learning Curve - the background processes that make thick orientation possible
• Schleps, Puzzles, and Packages: Solving the Problem Problem - why selecting the right problem requires thick understanding of the landscape