How clear our direction is
Almost every organisation has a strategy. It has been written, signed off, and presented on a slide with three pillars and a timeline. It exists.
The question this dimension asks is not whether it exists. It is how far it has got.
A strategy is not a document. It is a shared understanding of where an organisation is heading, and what that means for the work in front of you. The document is where it starts. Whether it becomes a shared understanding is a separate matter - and it is the one that determines whether the strategy does anything at all.
So the dimension traces a thread. It runs from strategic intention through to whether people can see it, whether it shapes their work, whether they have any hand in it, and whether the decisions the organisation makes look like they came from the same place. The old phrase for this is the golden thread, and it is a good one, because a thread is a thing that can be followed and a thing that can break.
Five statements, one for each point along it. The thread can snap at any of them, and it snaps in a different place in every organisation.
Direction that reaches the work changes what people do. That is not a controversial claim - it is close to a truism, and truisms of that kind tend to survive because they hold. What is less obvious is that the thing usually measured is whether the strategy is good, while the thing that determines whether it does any work is whether it arrived.
A strategy nobody can see cannot guide a decision. A strategy people can recite but cannot apply will not change how Tuesday goes. A strategy that arrives fully specified, method included, produces compliance rather than commitment - and the two behave differently the moment something unexpected happens. In each case the plan may be sound. In each case it has not landed, and an organisation with a sound plan that has not landed is operating without one.
This is why the dimension is a thread rather than a topic. It is not measuring how much strategy an organisation has. It is measuring how far the strategy travelled - from intention, to visibility, to daily work, to ownership, to the coherence of the decisions that follow. Five statements, because there are five places it can stop.
And it needs the other seven around it, because knowing where the thread broke does not tell you why. A strategy that cannot be seen is a different problem from one that can be seen and is not believed. Read against Connection, you learn whether the organisation's reasoning travels at all, or only its decisions. Read against Culture, you learn whether people can say so when the plan makes no sense to them. Read against Change, you learn whether the direction keeps moving before anyone has had time to follow it.
Strategy shows you where the thread stopped. The other seven help you understand what stopped it.
The Strategy score is the mean of five statements. They are best read in order, because they run along the thread - each asking whether the strategy made it one step further than the last. The mean is where the reading starts. Where the sequence breaks is where it gets interesting.
Whether people have a clear picture of where the organisation is heading.
The first test, and the plainest: has the direction arrived at all? Nothing further along the thread is possible without it. A strategy that has not reached someone cannot shape their work, cannot be owned by them, and cannot explain a decision to them. This is also the statement where responses most often differ by role level - worth reading as a distance rather than a disagreement, because it shows how far the direction travelled before it stopped.
Whether a person's daily work feeds into what the organisation is trying to achieve.
Arrival is not the same as connection. People can hold an accurate picture of where the organisation is heading and still not know what it means for the thing on their desk. Where this dynamic is reported as less true, direction has been communicated but not translated - people know the words, and continue exactly as before, because nothing in the strategy told them what to do differently.
Whether people get a real say in how the strategy is carried out.
The what is usually set above you. The how does not have to be. This dynamic separates a strategy people are enacting from one they are executing, and the separation matters: it is possible for a strategy to be understood perfectly and owned by nobody. Understanding and ownership are not the same reading, and this is the point on the thread where they come apart.
Whether decisions across the organisation feel like one shared plan.
The first three dynamics ask what the strategy did to people. This one asks what it did to the organisation. People read strategy backwards, from the decisions it produces - and where investment, hiring and priority calls across different parts of the organisation share a visible logic, the strategy is doing its work whether or not anyone can quote it. Coordination is most of what a strategy is for, and this is the dynamic that reads whether it produced any.
Whether priorities still connect to the bigger picture when they change.
The last test, and the hardest: does the thread hold when things move? Priorities shift in every organisation. Where the connection back to the bigger picture survives the shift, a reprioritisation reads as a course correction. Where it does not, the same event reads as one more thing changing for reasons nobody explained. This is where a strategy that looked well-communicated on launch day is most likely to come apart - because it was communicated once, as a plan, rather than held as a direction.
The assessment asks how often each statement is true. Below is what each end of that scale describes. Neither column is a judgement - both are descriptions of what people report.
Alongside the five scored statements, everyone is asked one open question about strategy:
What would help you see where this organisation is heading?
A practical question, and it tends to produce practical answers. The responses are not scored, summarised or averaged. They appear in the dashboard as written, so the numbers and the words can be read next to each other rather than one standing in for the other.
Where Strategy sits against the other seven dimensions, and how much of the overall shape it accounts for.
The thread, laid out. Which of the five statements the score rests on, and which sit further from it - which is how you find the point where the strategy stopped travelling.
Strategy is where role level routinely produces the widest divergence of the eight, and the divergence is informative: it shows how far along the thread the direction reached. The dashboard shows that split rather than resolving it into one number.
In their own words, unsummarised.
Five statements, each answered on the same five-point frequency scale: almost always, often, sometimes, occasionally, rarely. The prompt is how true is this in your experience?
That prompt is a deliberate choice. Agreement scales measure opinion - whether someone endorses a proposition about the organisation. Frequency scales measure observation - how often a person reports seeing something happen. Opinion tells you what people think about the organisation. Frequency tells you what they encounter in it.
The dimension score is the mean of the five. It is reported on the 1-5 scale rather than converted to a percentage, and it carries the language of the scale with it - a Strategy score of 3.6 reads often true, and means the average respondent reported these five conditions as often true, not that the organisation scored 72%.
Alongside the mean, the dashboard shows the spread. Two organisations can return the same Strategy score with different distributions underneath: one where the five statements cluster tightly, one where two sit high and three sit low. The mean is identical. What it describes is not.
On Strategy, this carries more than on most dimensions, because the five statements are sequential. A mean of 3.2 built from five statements all sitting near 3.2 describes a thread that is thin along its whole length. The same mean built from two high statements and three low ones describes a thread that arrived and then broke - and tells you where.
Strategy is one of eight dimensions States of Vitality reads across a whole workforce. We can talk through what an assessment would look like - scope, timing and price.