The Good Strategy Kernel

From strategy content to strategic coherence – an interactive innographic of Rumelt’s strategy kernel

The strength of the model is precisely its simplicity: strategy is not defined by the thickness of the plan, but by the quality of the logic that connects understanding, choice and action.

Yet there is a small problem when the kernel is used diagnostically. Assessing its three components independently can still produce a misleadingly positive picture.

An organization may have a sophisticated diagnosis and an apparently sensible guiding policy, while the policy does not actually address the diagnosed challenge. It may formulate a clear policy but continue funding activities that contradict it. Or it may have a coherent portfolio of actions that is highly effective at solving the wrong problem.

In other words, good strategy requires more than three strong components. It also requires coherence between them.

From three elements to six dimensions

That observation led me to develop the interactive diagnostic:

The model retains Rumelt’s three elements as its core dimensions and adds three integration dimensions between them:

1. Diagnosis — does the strategy explain the nature of the challenge rather than merely describe symptoms, targets or problems?
2. Policy fit — does the guiding policy logically follow from the diagnosis?
3. Guiding policy — has an overall approach been chosen that provides focus and constrains subsequent choices?
4. Policy–action alignment — do the consequential actions and resource commitments actually implement that policy?
5. Coherent actions — do actions reinforce one another as a coordinated response rather than form a collection of independent initiatives?
6. Challenge–action fit — taken as a whole, do those actions ultimately address the obstacles identified in the diagnosis?

The three additional dimensions are not part of Rumelt’s original kernel. They are an operational extension: they make the relationships between the three elements explicitly assessable.

There is good reason to take those relationships seriously. Contemporary strategy-implementation research increasingly treats implementation not as a simple final stage following formulation, but as a complex set of interconnected managerial and organizational activities. Tawse and Tabesh’s (2021) review, for example, describes implementation as an underdeveloped “black box” and identifies competence, commitment and coordination as important conditions for implementation effectiveness. Friesl, Stensaker and Colman (2021) similarly conceptualize implementation as strategy work: activities involving structure and process matching, resource matching, monitoring, framing and negotiation.

This matters because a strategy can be internally persuasive on paper while being weak in organizational practice. More recent literature reinforces this point. Strategy-as-practice research has increasingly shifted attention from strategy as something an organization has towards strategizing as something organizational actors do through practices, processes and interactions (Kohtamäki et al., 2022).

A 2024 review of strategy alignment goes one step further and explicitly identifies alignment as an important bridge between strategy formulation and implementation. The review argues that alignment should not simply be assumed once a strategy has been formulated; it requires separate attention.

The most recent systematic review I found makes the same issue even clearer. Holm, Kringelum and Anand (2025) reviewed 160 papers on strategy implementation and conclude that implementation depends on interacting managerial and organizational levers, including resource orchestration, organizational structure, communication, operationalization, stakeholder involvement and managerial capabilities. Their synthesis also emphasizes the interdependencies between these mechanisms rather than treating implementation as a set of independent tasks.

That is essentially what the three integration axes in this diagnostic are designed to expose.

What the diagnostic is actually testing

The visual logic is deliberately inverted: poor scores are located towards the outside and stronger scores move towards the centre — the kernel.

The three core dimensions use nine developmental levels. The three integration dimensions use four anchor levels — 2, 4, 6 and 8 — positioned at the equivalent points on the same scale. This makes it possible to distinguish between a strategy in which the individual components are strong and one in which those components are also mutually reinforcing.

The overall percentage is primarily a summary device. More interesting than the number itself is usually the shape.

A strategy with a strong diagnosis but weak policy fit suggests that the organization understands its problem but has not converted that understanding into a consequential choice. Strong guiding policy combined with weak policy–action alignment suggests an execution gap. Strong actions with weak challenge–action fit may indicate something more fundamental: the organization is capable of coordinated execution, but its activity is drifting away from the challenge it originally set out to address.

That distinction matters. Contemporary evidence does not support the simple claim that formal planning itself guarantees performance. Meta-analytic work finds a positive relationship between corporate planning and organizational performance, but also substantial variation depending on organizational and contextual conditions (Hamann, Halw, & Guenther, 2023). Likewise, research on implementation tools such as the Balanced Scorecard shows that the presence of a tool is insufficient: the tool itself must be embedded and implemented effectively (Tawse & Tabesh, 2023).

The practical implication is straightforward: having strategy components is not the same as having strategic coherence.

Good strategy, strategic fluff and bad strategy

The diagnostic distinguishes three broad outcomes.

A good strategy has a sufficiently strong kernel and sufficiently strong connections between its elements. A bad strategy lacks that basic strategic logic. Between those two sits what I call strategic fluff: a strategy in which recognisable strategic thinking is present, but where important choices, causal connections or action implications remain vague, implicit or diluted.

The terminology is deliberately indebted to Rumelt, who uses fluff for language that gives the appearance of strategic thinking without doing the underlying strategic work. The scoring thresholds in this tool, however, are mine. They should not be interpreted as empirically established cut-off scores derived from Rumelt’s work.

That qualification is important more generally. This is a diagnostic framework, not a psychometrically validated measurement instrument. A score of 72% is not evidence that an organization possesses precisely 72% of a good strategy. The numerical layer forces evaluators to make distinctions; its principal purpose is to expose disagreement, assumptions and weak links and thereby improve the strategic conversation.

I would therefore use the instrument with several people independently before comparing results. Divergence can be more informative than consensus. If one executive scores the diagnosis as actionable while another sees only a problem list, the interesting question is not whose number is correct. The disagreement itself reveals that the strategic logic may not be as explicit as the organization assumes.

Why build another strategy tool?

Strategy does not suffer from a shortage of frameworks.

The useful question is therefore not whether another framework can describe strategy, but whether it helps people interrogate one.

That is the purpose of this diagnostic. It takes a deliberately simple conceptual model — Rumelt’s strategy kernel — and turns it into a set of increasingly demanding tests. The three additional integration dimensions are intended to make it harder for an attractive diagnosis, an elegant policy statement or an impressive portfolio of projects to compensate for weak logic between them.

Good strategy should survive that test.

And if it does not, finding the weak connection may be considerably more useful than writing another strategy document.

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References

Friesl, M., Stensaker, I., & Colman, H. L. (2021). Strategy implementation: Taking stock and moving forward. Long Range Planning, 54(4), 102064. doi:10.1016/j.lrp.2020.102064.

Hamann, P. M., Halw, O., & Guenther, T. W. (2023). Meta-analysis of the corporate planning–organizational performance relationship: A research note. Strategic Management Journal, 44(7), 1803–1819. doi:10.1002/smj.3476.

Holm, C. G., Kringelum, L., & Anand, A. (2026). Creating effective strategy implementation: A systematic review of managerial and organizational levers. Review of Managerial Science, 20, 673–705. Published online 2025. doi:10.1007/s11846-025-00880-3.

Iskandar, A., & Ardianto, E. (2024). Strategy alignment: Key factors for effective strategy implementation: A review of conceptual and empirical literature. Jurnal Ilmiah Bisnis dan Ekonomi Asia, 18(3), 246–268. doi:10.32815/jibeka.v18i3.1459.

Kohtamäki, M., Whittington, R., Vaara, E., & Rabetino, R. (2022). Making connections: Harnessing the diversity of strategy-as-practice research. International Journal of Management Reviews, 24, 210–232. doi:10.1111/ijmr.12274.

Rumelt, R. P. (2011). Good strategy/bad strategy: The difference and why it matters. Crown Business.

Tawse, A., & Tabesh, P. (2021). Strategy implementation: A review and an introductory framework. European Management Journal, 39(1), 22–33. doi:10.1016/j.emj.2020.09.005.

Tawse, A., & Tabesh, P. (2023). Thirty years with the balanced scorecard: What we have learned. Business Horizons, 66(1), 123–132. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2022.03.005.