Most data strategies are long documents nobody reopens. A strategy you cannot hold in your head guides no decisions. The five questions that fit on one page.

Your data strategy should fit on one page

Most data strategies are forty-page documents. They are commissioned with good intentions, written with real effort, presented once to a row of polite nods, then never opened again. They live in a shared drive as evidence that the organisation took data seriously for a fortnight in the spring.

In practice, this is where our data strategy and leadership work comes in, and Hire For The Next Decade, Not The Last One covers useful related ground.

The problem is not that they are bad. Plenty are thorough and well argued. The problem is that a strategy you cannot hold in your head guides no decision in the moment one needs making, and decisions get made in the moment, in meetings, under pressure, by people who will not pause to re-read a forty-page PDF to check whether what they are about to do is on plan. If it does not fit in their heads, it does not exist where it counts.

Length is a comfort blanket

There is a quiet reason these documents grow. Length feels like rigour. A thick deck feels like progress, like value for the fee, like the matter has been dealt with. It is reassuring in precisely the way that the actual hard thinking is not. But the hard thinking is the opposite of length. It is the discipline of deciding what matters most and finding the nerve to leave the rest out. A real strategy is mostly a set of choices about what you will not do. The forty-pager dodges those choices by including everything, which is the surest sign it is not a strategy at all. It is an inventory.

The five questions that fit on a page

So here is something you can do this week, for nothing, worth more than most strategy engagements. Sit down and answer five questions, in plain English, on a single page.

What decisions are we actually trying to make better, the specific ones, not data for its own sake. What few numbers do those decisions turn on. What is the one thing most getting in the way right now, the honest blocker, whether that is messy data, no ownership, or no agreed definitions. What will we build this year, and just as importantly, what will we deliberately not build. And how will we know it worked, in terms a sceptical finance director would accept.

Answer those five on one page and you have a strategy people can carry into a meeting and use. Fail to, and no quantity of extra pages will rescue it, because the gaps are not in the writing. They are in the thinking, and a longer document is just a better-dressed way of avoiding them.

We keep this discipline at the heart of our analytics strategy work and it shapes how we scope the Analytics Acceleration Programme, because a plan you can hold in your head is a plan that gets followed. The test of a good data strategy was never its weight. It is whether the person making a decision on Thursday can remember what it says.

If any of this sounds familiar, talk to us about your data.

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