Strategy is Creative
A practical approach to business design for game company leaders.
Low-res
Creating strategy is creative business design, much like designing a game. Strategy certainly needs analysis, but analysis only gives you the ingredients — your creativity decides what to cook.
Start with reality: an honest read of what your organisation can genuinely become excellent at, combined with where the market is leaving room for it. Strategy lives in that overlap.
The heart of it is choice — deciding where to focus, how to win, and what to stop. A strategy that tries to preserve every opportunity is no strategy; it’s FOMO.
It only becomes real when it changes decisions: capital allocation, organisational structure, leadership, and the everyday language people actually use and remember.
Strategy cannot be outsourced. Advisers can sharpen the analysis, but only the CEO, board and leadership team have to live with the consequences.
Hi-res
I recently had a discussion about how game companies experiencing complex challenges should think about and implement new strategies—not least given the turmoil in the industry.
Over nearly thirty years, I’ve helped create strategies as a founder, CEO and investor—most recently for a game company that was overextended, under serious financial pressure, and lacked a coherent direction.
Strategy in the games industry is too often mistaken for one of two extremes: either an endless deck of corporate analysis from management consultants, or an unguided creative vision that tells you what games to make but not what company to build.
Strategy is inherently a creative endeavour: business design.
It requires analysis. You need to understand your organisation, your market, your competitors, your customers and where the world is heading. But analysis only gives you the ingredients. It does not tell you what to cook.
Your creativity is what turns those ingredients into a possible future.
In that sense, creating a strategy resembles designing a game.
When designing a game, you begin with your team: what it cares about, what it understands and what it can do well. Then you look outward. What are players responding to? Where is the market crowded, and where is there room for something new? The answers do not resolve every design detail—you figure those out as you build—but they establish a direction and help you decide what belongs and what does not.
Creating a company strategy is the same kind of process. It requires an honest assessment of organisational capability and market direction, followed by choices about capital, structure, leadership and what the company will stop doing. And those choices are often painful and contentious, if you’re doing strategy right.
Strategy starts with reality
Before choosing a direction, you need an honest understanding of where you are today.
A few years ago, when I joined a large games company as its CEO, I was tasked with developing a coherent strategy. The company had been investing, building products and making acquisitions for years, but no clear logic tied those decisions together. Older strategy documents existed, but none felt genuine or operationally real. In practice, the business had no strategy, so the work had to start almost from scratch.
Begin with the organisation. What has performed well, and what has not? Which strengths are real and repeatable? Which successes came from strong execution, and which depended on timing, luck or a few exceptional people carrying the organisation?
Commercial performance is the clearest place to begin. A company that cannot create sustainable commercial success will eventually run out of time. But the numbers only show what happened. The more useful question is why it happened. What did the organisation actively do to create that result, and can it do it again?
Identify the real problem. You also need to understand what strategy the company is already following, whether deliberately or by default. What assumptions is it built on? Where is it working, and where is it creating friction? From there, identify the central problem the new strategy must solve. If you cannot state that problem clearly, you are not ready to choose a solution for it.
Then look outside. How are customer expectations, technology and competition changing? You do not need to understand every trend in the industry, but you need to understand how the relevant part of the market is changing, and what that means for the company’s choices.
At the company I ran, our real strengths were in high-quality, creative indie games for PC and console — not mobile, not free-to-play, not AAA. So most of what was happening in mobile or live service was, for us, secondary. The question became narrower: where was the PC and console market leaving room for a focused publisher and developer of premium indie games?
The truly useful work comes from combining that analysis with the leadership team’s own experience, judgment and imagination. Only the leadership team can decide which future it believes is plausible and worth preparing for.
Strategy is creative choice
Once you understand the organisation and have a view of where the market is going, the leadership team has to make choices.
Imagine a possible future. Which opportunities will you pursue? Which will you ignore? What kind of company are you trying to become?
This is where strategy becomes creative: the leadership team has to imagine a coherent future, test it, refine it and finally commit to it.
At the company I led, that meant becoming a focused publisher and developer of premium indie games—a deliberate bet on one gap in the market, and a commitment to stop trying to be everything else. The analysis identified the opportunity; deciding how to build the company around it was the creative part.
Avoid the traps. A few are particularly common. The first is capability delusion: choosing a direction that requires the organisation to become something it has little realistic ability to become. The second is aspiration without a path: describing an exciting future without the stepping stones required to reach it.
Know when to say no. Choosing where to focus also means choosing where not to. A strategy that tries to preserve every opportunity is no strategy. It’s FOMO. One of the hardest things I do as a leader is to decide which teams, products, markets and capabilities deserve more attention, and which should be reduced, harvested or stopped.
The same applies to innovation: where experimentation is necessary, where proven methods are sufficient, and how much resource the company can commit to R&D.
Protect the friction. Strategy also fails when every stakeholder’s existing priorities are preserved. You can call it consensus laundering: disagreement is smoothed away until the final strategy makes no meaningful choices.
I had to make those trade-offs while leading a company under severe financial pressure. With an incomplete strategy and dwindling runway, we couldn't wait for perfection. We used a provisional strategy to make immediate, hard choices: deciding which games and dev teams to protect, and which to close. Even an imperfect strategy gave us a rational basis for acting. Without that, any direction could be defended, and the cuts would have become arbitrary and political.
Strategy becomes execution
A strategy becomes useful when it starts changing decisions.
Spend wisely. Capital allocation is the obvious place to begin. Every major investment should be tested against the strategy: is this where we have chosen to focus, or are we making a deliberate exception to go off-strategy?
Build for the strategy. It may require different structures, capabilities and leadership. Some people can grow into those needs; others may not. The gaps must be addressed through training, hiring, partnerships or acquisitions. “The organisation will step up” is not an implementation plan.
In the turnaround I mentioned, that meant removing two layers of management. The executive team had become too distant from the real business to see clearly what was happening. Under pressure, those layers had also begun to breed defensiveness, with managers protecting their positions and past decisions. They could be rebuilt once the company stabilised.
Drive internalisation. A company-wide strategy also needs to be translated by the organisation itself. I’ve run workshops in which each team worked out what the strategy meant for its own priorities and decisions. The point was for teams to make it theirs, rather than just receive it from me in a presentation. That internalisation is part of making the strategy real.
For a strategy to be lived every day, it has to be expressed in language the organisation recognises as its own. A strategy that sounds intelligent and well researched but that no one understands is worthless. Short phrases, clear priorities and a few good slogans can go a long way. I ended our strategy deck with a handful of declarations: “Make developers the stars”, “Sell like hell” and “Take ownership; make decisions”. People remember and repeat lines like those, not paragraphs.
Delegate mandates and assess results. The rollout should also clarify decision rights: which decisions teams can make themselves, and which require executive approval. A strategy should reduce unnecessary escalation, not create more of it.
You ideally also need a way to tell whether the strategy is working before the financial results arrive — a few stepping stones and leading indicators, alongside organisational health and customer satisfaction, will show whether the momentum is building.
A good strategy should remain relevant for several years, but its assumptions and execution should be reviewed once or twice a year. We operate in a fast-changing industry, so not all strategies will survive contact with reality for long. If commercial results disappoint, or the organisation experiences persistent friction with the chosen direction, it may be time to reassess either the strategy or the organisation executing it.
Strategy must be owned
Many people should contribute to a strategy, but the executive team must lead the creation of it. The board should challenge it and ultimately approve it. External advisers can add research, frameworks and an outside perspective.
But ownership cannot be shared so that accountability disappears.
Make it yours. The CEO has to own the strategy, believe in it and argue for it. A Chief Strategy Officer or consultant can support the work, but cannot carry that responsibility. If the strategy fails, the CEO cannot blame the process or the advisers.
The leadership team does not need to agree on every point during the debate. But once the strategy is decided, its members need to commit to it and lead others through it. If a leader fundamentally does not believe in the chosen direction, that eventually becomes an organisational problem that must be resolved.
Diagnose and act. Once implementation begins, the CEO and board should regularly review the results and leading indicators together. They need to distinguish between weak execution, a capability gap and a strategy built on assumptions that no longer hold.
In the end, the board and CEO need to be aligned. If persistent disagreement makes alignment impossible, either the CEO or the composition of the board ultimately needs to change.
Closing
No strategy guarantees success. Markets move, competitors act, products fail and organisations learn. Strategy gives a company coherent direction and a shared basis for making decisions as those things happen.
Analysis and frameworks help narrow the possibilities. But the creative work is choosing which future to pursue, why the organisation can succeed there and what it should stop doing. Leadership then has to own that choice, shape the organisation around it and keep testing it against changing conditions.
A good strategy turns an imagined future into a coherent system of choices. It helps people across the company understand what matters, what does not and how their everyday decisions contribute to the direction of the business. If it cannot do that, it may still be an interesting document. But it is not a useful strategy.
That combination of imagination and coherence is why the comparison with game design stays with me. You cannot analyse your way to a great game, and you cannot analyse your way to a great strategy. In both, someone has to imagine what is not there yet, choose to build it and keep refining it as reality unfolds.
Appendix: A practical strategy process
Here is the full process distilled into a practical sequence that leadership teams can use and adapt.
1. Strategy starts with reality
Understand the current strategy and any proposed shifts.
Assess the organisation’s strengths, weaknesses and why past performance happened.
Identify the central problem the strategy needs to solve.
Analyse where the market is heading.
Test whether the current strategy and organisation fit that future.
2. Strategy is creative choice
Find the overlap between organisational capability and market opportunity.
Choose where to focus, how to succeed, and what to stop pursuing.
Explain why the company is well placed to succeed in that direction.
Use simple frameworks to structure the thinking.
State the assumptions the strategy depends on.
Test the emerging strategy broadly without diluting ownership.
Avoid capability delusion, aspiration without a path, and consensus laundering.
3. Strategy becomes real through execution
Translate the choices into capital allocation.
Design the organisation and leadership needed to execute them.
Close capability gaps by training, hiring, partnering, acquiring, or stopping.
Clarify decision rights.
Break the strategy down by division and team.
Define immediate priorities, stepping stones, leading indicators, and financial outcomes.
Use language people can understand and remember.
Build rollout and internalisation into the strategy process.
4. Strategy must be owned
The executive team creates and drives the work.
The board stays involved and ultimately approves the strategy.
Consultants and strategy teams support; they do not own.
The CEO believes in the strategy and accepts accountability for it.
Review it regularly against commercial performance and organisational friction.
If the CEO and board cannot align, it is a governance problem.
This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.
I think you're describing something I see in creative work. Analysis and choice, exploration to the point of never choosing. That is the process for writers: research, rewrite, rethink, redo, reconsider. If we never stop the cycle of overanalyzing our art, we never make our art. The work we do doesn't really begin to come alive until an idea is allowed to shape what comes next.