Jargon tends to pile up on strategy slides because it sounds like thinking. Below is one real slide and the two rounds of feedback HAITE gave on it, followed by what the next draft needs.
"Our Strategy: leveraging synergistic cross-functional paradigms to optimise holistic stakeholder value-creation across verticals via agile, data-driven, customer-centric innovation frameworks (see appendix 4b)"
Score: 1.5/10, "Zero information, maximum jargon."
"That's not a strategy, it's a word salad with a corporate accent. Every noun is a buzzword, every verb is a euphemism, and 'see appendix 4b' is the only honest part - because the actual content is hidden somewhere else. A strategy says what you'll do, for whom, and why you'll win."
"Our strategy: cut customer churn from 9% to 7% this year by fixing onboarding. 1) Call every new customer in their first week. 2) Rebuild the setup guide. 3) Track churn every month."
Score: 5/10, "A decent to-do list wearing a strategy's clothes."
From HAITE's reply: "It's a real plan, which puts you ahead of most slides, but it's a to-do list, not a strategy. The target is fine - 9% to 7% is specific and measurable - yet the three bullets are just activities... The one genuinely good move is calling every new customer in week one... A strategy states the causal chain; this states the chores."
The second draft scores higher because it has a target and real actions. What it still lacks is the reason those actions should change the number.
Richard Rumelt's book Good Strategy Bad Strategy describes three parts: a diagnosis of what's going wrong and why, a guiding policy for dealing with it, and a set of actions that follow from that policy. The second draft has actions but no diagnosis, which is why it reads like a list of chores.
With the team's own figures in the brackets:
Diagnosis: "[x]% of customers who leave do so in their first 30 days, and most say setup was too hard [source: exit survey]."
Policy: "Make the first week easy, because that's where we lose people."
Actions: "Every new customer gets a 20-minute setup call in week one. We rewrite the three setup steps where most people get stuck [from support tickets]."
Measure: "30-day churn falls from [x]% to [y]%, which brings annual churn from 9% to 7%."
| Jargon | Ask instead |
|---|---|
| Leverage synergies | Which two teams will work together, on what? |
| Optimise stakeholder value | Who benefits, and how will we know? |
| Data-driven | Which number decides what we do next? |
| Customer-centric | What will customers notice has changed? |
| Innovation framework | What are we going to try first? |
Paste your work into HAITE and it will tell you what's wrong with it. You set how harsh it is, from 1 to 10. It's free to start.