Not to decide is to decide.” Harvey Cox, the Harvard theologian, was writing in a very different context, but the line belongs just as comfortably in a strategy discussion.

Anyone who has worked inside an organisation with an unclear strategy knows what indecision feels like. It rarely presents itself as indecision. More often, it arrives dressed as ambition: five strategic priorities, four customer segments, three growth platforms and a commitment to be simultaneously premium, accessible, innovative, efficient and customer-centric. Nobody has technically said no to anything, which can make the strategy feel inclusive and comprehensive. It can also make it nearly useless.

I sometimes think of this as pizza strategy. Every stakeholder gets a topping. Nobody has to make the uncomfortable call about what comes off. Eventually you have created something that contains everyone's preference and very little point of view.

The problem does not stay contained in the strategy document. It travels straight into the guts of the organisation.

Jay Galbraith's Star Model, developed in the 1970s and still one of the most useful pieces of organisation-design thinking I know, helps explain why. Galbraith argued that organisation design involves the alignment of five interconnected elements: strategy, structure, processes, rewards and people. Strategy determines how the organisation intends to win. Structure establishes where responsibilities and decisions sit. Processes determine how information and work move across the organisation. Rewards shape what people actually prioritise. People encompasses the capabilities and mindsets the organisation needs to execute.

The power of the model is not the five components themselves. It is the recognition that they operate as a system.

Start with a strategy that makes clear choices and the rest of the organisation has something to organise around. Structure can reflect the capabilities and markets that matter most. Decision rights can be placed deliberately. Processes can be designed around the few things that need to work exceptionally well. Measures and incentives can reinforce those priorities. Talent decisions can build the capabilities the strategy actually requires.

Start instead with a strategy that is essentially an accumulation of compromises and every downstream design choice becomes harder.

If every customer is strategic, which customer gets priority when resources are scarce? If growth, margin, innovation and operational efficiency are all equally important, what wins when they collide? If the business wants to be both highly customised and ruthlessly standardised, which principle guides the person making the trade-off on Tuesday afternoon?

The organisation still has to answer those questions. Leadership has simply pushed the decisions downward.

That is one of the less obvious costs of weak strategy. Leaders can avoid making a difficult choice at the top, but the trade-off does not disappear. It gets redistributed throughout the organisation and made repeatedly by people with less information, less authority and often conflicting incentives. What looks like flexibility from the executive suite can feel like confusion everywhere else.

This is why I think Galbraith's model remains such underused consulting gold. It exposes the fiction that strategy can sit neatly on one page while the rest of the organisation carries on around it. Strategy ripples through everything.

When the organisation looks confused, one of the first questions should therefore be whether its design is broken or whether it is faithfully expressing a strategy that has never made enough choices.

This is also why I am skeptical when simplification is treated as a cosmetic exercise. Reducing a strategy from ten priorities to four does not necessarily make it simpler if the four still avoid the hard choices. Simplicity is not about using fewer words or fitting everything onto one slide. It comes from deciding what matters most and accepting the consequences of that decision.

That may mean choosing which customers you will serve disproportionately well and which ones you will not optimise around. It may mean deciding which capabilities deserve investment and which ones can remain merely adequate. It may mean acknowledging that two desirable objectives are genuinely in tension and choosing which one wins.

Those are uncomfortable decisions because strategy is ultimately an exercise in exclusion. Saying yes generates energy. Saying no creates clarity.

Much of my work with leadership teams involves helping them make those calls, particularly where years of sensible compromises have accumulated into something nobody would have designed deliberately. The objective is rarely to generate more ideas. Most organisations have plenty. The harder job is determining which ideas deserve scarce attention, capital and organisational capacity, then letting the others go.

Overcomplication is easy because it postpones the moment of choice. Simplicity requires considerably more discipline.

And when the strategy starts to look like a pizza with everyone's favourite topping, it may be worth remembering Cox's warning. Refusing to choose does not leave the organisation without a decision. It simply means the decision gets made somewhere else.