Right Action = Right Results?

An out-of-home care provider for at-risk youth was facing the loss of critical funding, not because their work lacked value, but because not enough young people in their care had transitioned into independent living.

The funding model was built on a logic many still accept: program activities deliver measurable outcomes.

However, outcomes like education, employment and independent living are emergent and not directly controllable. They can be incentivised, supported and reinforced, but they are not levers you can just pull.

The provider wasn't failing. They were doing the slow, essential work of restoring stability, trust and safety, addressing trauma histories, and providing progressive life skills education in a non-pressured environment.

They were creating the conditions from which independent living might emerge, but the funding model couldn't see that.

It measured results, not readiness, and treated the absence of fast results as evidence of poor performance.

That logic is not limited to funding bodies.

In our State of Strategy Survey with 210 leaders across SME's, not-for-profits, and public sector organisations, 83% said their strategic conversations focus almost entirely on actions:

• What have we done?

• What are we doing?

• What are we going to do?

• Which initiatives "matter"?

Reporting followed the same logic: track the action, measure the result, adjust course.

Beneath it all is a common belief: Right actions = the right results.

But is this true?

If your result only requires lever pulling because you control the entire causal chain, then maybe. But if your results depend on other people, relationships, systems, policies, behaviours and other external factors...then your outcomes are not directly controllable.

That means:

Actions don't cause results. Conditions do.

We shape the conditions they emerge from.

Here's the truth most strategy overlooks:

Actions only work within conditions that allow them to.

Yet, conditions are often treated as background noise (in environmental scans) and reduced to trend-spotting, contextual framing, or a post-mortem explanation of failures. They are treated as something to be referenced, but not shaped.

Rarely are they treated as the womb space within which results are conceived, nurtured, and brought to life.

However, it's within this womb of conditions that the real dynamics of strategy play out:

• Time delays and breakdowns

• Resistance and interference

• Misdirection (solving or chasing the wrong thing)

• Feedback loops that amplify or undo your efforts

• Sabotage (intentional or unintentional)

If our conditions include dynamics that are working against us, even the best-planned actions can fail, underdeliver or backfire. More often than not, we spin our wheels, burn time, effort, and resources and go nowhere.

That's why strategy isn't just about planning what to do and how.

It's about creating the conditions that allow what you do to work and have impact.

It begins with a powerful reframing question that opens the symbolic eye of strategy.

If there is only one strategic question you can ask, this is it:

What needs to be true to achieve your objective?

Not "What do we do?"

But: "What needs to exist, be connected, be building up or slowing down and at what rate over time to achieve our objective?"

Strategy isn't a lever; it's more like growing a garden to feed many.

When we treat strategy like lever pulling, we act in fragments: Isolated functions, disconnected tactics, surface metrics.

Real strategy, however, works in layers and operates through time.

It isn't about choosing better actions; It's about shaping a world of conditions where our actions can have an impact.

In the first edition of my newsletter Audacious Feats of Strategy, I'll reveal the life principle strategy lives or dies by, and how to apply "what needs to be true..." as a practical strategy design tool.

Subscribe here to find out more.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to hear how this lands with you.