Business strategy manuals

A strategy manual is only worth writing if somebody can act from it on a Monday morning without you in the room.

What a strategy manual actually is

Two different documents get called the same thing. A strategy document says what you are choosing to do and, more importantly, what you are choosing not to do. An operating manual — a runbook — says how a specific piece of work gets done, step by step, by whoever is holding it this week. Most businesses commission the first and need the second.

The test is simple: hand the document to a competent person who has never done the task, leave the building, and see whether the work happens. A strategy deck fails that test by design. A runbook that fails it was not finished.

Why most of them are never opened again

They are written once, by a consultant, in the consultant's language, describing the business as it was during the engagement. Three months later a system has changed, a person has left, and the document is wrong in a way nobody can see without reading all forty pages.

The manuals that survive share three properties: they are short, they live next to the work rather than in a shared drive, and whoever does the task is the person who edits them. A manual with a named owner stays current. A manual owned by "the business" rots.

What belongs in one

For each workflow: the trigger that starts it, the systems it touches, the steps in order, the decisions a human has to make and on what basis, what to do when it fails, and who to ask. That last line is the one people skip and the one that gets used most.

If a step says "review for accuracy", it is not written yet. Accurate against what? Checked how? A step a new person cannot perform is a note to yourself, not an instruction.

Where this sits in our work

Every build we do includes the written runbook and a training session, inside the fixed price rather than sold back afterwards. That is not generosity — it is self-interest. We have been the people who inherited somebody else's automation with no documentation, and we would rather not be the firm that does it to someone else.