Social Media Day, which falls on 30 June, marks the anniversary of a shift that now feels too embedded to remember beginning. The platforms it celebrates have, over two decades, rewired expectations about responsiveness. In public life and increasingly in organisational life, speed reads as competence. The fast take gets the engagement; the considered analysis, published later, arrives into silence.
Strategy planning has not been immune. The rapid sprint, the compressed OKR cycle, the two-day off-site that produces a strategic framework: these are attractive not only because they save time, but because they feel like evidence of decisiveness. Slow planning is associated with bureaucracy, committees, and organisations that cannot act. Speed signals the opposite. The problem is that speed in strategy is conditional, and the conditions matter more than the pace.
What Fast Strategy Actually Produces
The outputs of a fast planning session look convincing. There are objectives, key results, owners, and timelines. The structure is correct. But the process cannot generate clarity that was not already present when it began; strategic planning adds form to thinking; it does not substitute for it.
The practical consequence is familiar to anyone who has sat in a planning session where the direction was still contested or the leadership team had not yet worked through the significant trade-offs. Outputs are produced and circulated, but the unresolved questions do not disappear - they move underground, where they will surface in execution as misalignment, repeated debate, and decisions that pull in different directions. By then, the plan is official, resources have been committed, and stakeholder expectations are set. Revisiting the foundations becomes a political difficulty, not just a practical one.
Every.to recently produced a full set of quarterly OKRs across a two-day window[1] using an AI agent that interviewed team members and structured their goals against company strategy. It is a compelling example of speed working. Having the foundation in place was the reason it worked, not the technology.
The Conditions That Make Speed Safe
Every.to entered its two-day OKR process with a clear, documented strategy that team members had absorbed. The people being interviewed were experienced enough to engage substantively; they understood what quarterly goals were for and could produce inputs of quality. The COO, Brandon Gell, reviewed the outputs before they became the organisation's official commitments for the quarter. The two days were fast. The rigour came from the foundation, not from the tools.
Three conditions are needed for this to be effective. The first is strategic clarity - a direction that is shared across the leadership team, not documented and pointed to, but internalised and consistently described. The second is experienced participants: people who understand how to translate intent into well-formed goals, who can distinguish a task from an objective without being prompted. The third is judgment at the end of the process: a substantive review by someone with authority and perspective, who applies their own assessment to what the process produced rather than approving it on procedural grounds.
When all three are present, the fast process can deliver. When any one is absent, speed just produces a more structured version of the confusion that was already there.
Diagnosing Your Organisation's Readiness
Three questions help to clarify whether the conditions for speed are in place, and they are most useful when answered honestly rather than aspirationally.
Ask whether you and the rest of the leadership team could each write down the organisation's strategic direction and arrive at the same answer. Not whether a strategy document exists - whether the people responsible for executing it share a real, working understanding of what it means. If the answers would differ materially, the direction is not yet ready to be planned against at pace.
Ask whether the people who will participate in the session understand what a good goal looks like. Whether they can distinguish an objective from a task, a key result from a metric, a plan from an aspiration. A session where this distinction needs explaining will produce inconsistent outputs regardless of how efficiently it runs.
Ask whether there is a person with genuine authority and perspective who will review the outputs before they become organisational commitments. Not whether the leadership team will sign off, but whether someone will bring their own judgment to bear on what the session produced. If the outputs will be adopted because the process was legitimate, rather than because they passed scrutiny, the process is performing rigour rather than producing it.
An answer of no to any of these is not a reason to abandon the planning. It is a signal about what to do first.
The Case for Strategic Patience
Arguing for speed in strategy is easy. Slow planning processes are often wasteful, and leaders are right to be impatient with them. Agile approaches to strategy delivery have real benefits. When the foundations are solid, moving fast is an advantage.
Strategic patience is not the opposite of speed. It is its precondition. The discipline involved is recognising when the prerequisites are not yet in place, and choosing to establish them, rather than proceed without them. The leader who pauses to build strategic clarity before running a planning sprint does not lose time to their peers; they avoid investing heavily in plans that will need to be revised, rolled back, or abandoned once the gaps in their foundation become apparent.
Most leaders have a working instinct about this. There is usually a moment, somewhere in the planning session, where it becomes apparent that the group does not yet share a view on the fundamentals. The pressure to have something to show overrides that instinct. Strategic patience means allowing it to inform the decision instead, and recognising that producing a plan on schedule is not the same as producing a plan worth following.
References
[1] Every.to - "How We Run a 25-person Company on Four AI Agents"
Ady Coles works with leadership teams to help strategy survive contact with reality. His focus is on strategy management and agile strategy delivery - designing the translation between intent and execution so that direction remains coherent as organisations move, grow, and adapt. He works as a fractional and advisory partner where clarity, judgement, and sustained alignment matter more than plans on paper.