Do Your Strategy When You’re Tired

Strategy is often treated as a moment of inspiration. A workshop. A deck. A bold statement about the future.

In reality, the most useful strategy work rarely happens when energy is high and optimism is unchecked. It happens when teams are tired enough that reality can’t be ignored.

Not burnt out. Not disengaged. Just tired enough that the fantasy version of next year doesn’t make it into the room.

The optimism trap

When strategy is done in moments of peak energy, organisations consistently overestimate what they can achieve. Capacity is assumed rather than tested. Focus is imagined rather than protected. Momentum is treated as infinite.

The result is familiar: long lists of initiatives, competing priorities, and strategies that look impressive but collapse under delivery pressure.

At TEC, we have deliberately taken a different approach. For the last five years, we have done our own strategy work at the end of cycles. When patience is low. When the cost of complexity is obvious. When there is little appetite for pretending everything can be done at once.

Strategy is not a plan on a page

One of the most common misunderstandings about strategy is that it is a single word or a neatly formatted plan.

It isn’t.

Strategy is an ever-growing list of things you are not doing.

This becomes much clearer when energy is limited. When teams are tired, they stop assuming they will suddenly say yes to everything, launch multiple new initiatives, or maintain excellence across unlimited fronts.

Instead, better questions emerge:

• What is the smallest change that will make the biggest impact?

• What is quietly draining time, money, or attention?

• What can be stopped without the system falling over?

These are not comfortable questions, but they are the ones that create strategies that hold.

Honest strategy designs for reality

Tired strategy strips away performative ambition and forces focus. It favours sustainability over heroics and designs for the version of the organisation that actually shows up in February, not the one that exists on a whiteboard in December.

This often makes the outcome feel underwhelming at first. The strategy may look simple. Even boring. But it is usually achievable, resilient, and far more likely to survive contact with delivery.

The same rule applies with clients

This approach does not change when strategy is done for clients. If anything, it becomes more important.

We start with constraints:

• Time

• Money

• People

• Attention

Then we ask a more honest question: given this, what is actually possible?

Not what sounds impressive. Not what looks good in a slide deck. But what can be delivered well, without breaking the system or the people within it.

Clarity over ambition

If a strategy feels heavy, bloated, or exhausting to read, that is usually a signal. Complexity has crept in where decisions should have been made. Strong strategy does not require more ambition. It requires clearer decisions, particularly about what will not be pursued. Sometimes the most effective way to find those decisions is to stop pretending the organisation is not tired, and design accordingly.

At TEC Consulting, we believe strategy should work under real conditions, not ideal ones. Designing from constraints is not pessimism. It is how strategies survive.