Week 8: The Hockey Stick Strategy Is a Lie. Stop Falling For It.
The Hockey Stick Strategy Is a Lie. Stop Falling For It.
Every strategy deck I have ever seen has one.
You know exactly what I am talking about. The graph on slide 14 -- or slide 22, or slide 37, depending on how much padding the strategy team added. The one that shows performance flat for Q1, Q2, Q3... and then miraculously shooting upward in Q4 like a hockey stick.
Revenue will be flat for nine months, then spike. Savings will accumulate slowly, then accelerate. Market share will hold steady, then surge. Transformation will take time, then deliver exponentially.
The hockey stick.
I have been in CI and operational transformation for over 20 years. I have worked in 40+ organisations. Shell, Johnson Controls, KCA Deutag, Petrogenium clients. Energy, manufacturing, drilling, engineering, financial services.
I have seen hundreds of hockey stick projections.
I have never seen one come true. Not once.
Why the Hockey Stick Seduces
I understand why people draw it. I genuinely do.
The hockey stick tells a story that every leader wants to believe. "We know it will be hard at first. We know results will be slow. But if we stay the course, the compound effect will kick in and the curve will inflect."
It is not technically wrong as a concept. Compound improvement is real. Early investment does create later acceleration. There is a legitimate theory behind the shape.
The problem is not the theory. The problem is that the theory becomes the plan. And when the plan shows flat results for nine months, something very predictable happens.
Month three: "Results are tracking to plan." Translation: nothing has improved.
Month six: "We are building the foundation for acceleration." Translation: still nothing has improved, but we expected that.
Month eight: "The inflection point is approaching." Translation: we are starting to panic because nothing has improved and we told the board the hockey stick would materialise.
Month ten: "We need to revisit the timeline." Translation: the hockey stick is not happening and we have no explanation that does not involve admitting the plan was wrong.
Month twelve: "The programme did not deliver the expected results." Translation: the hockey stick was a fantasy and we spent twelve months pretending flat performance was according to plan.
I have watched this exact sequence -- with only minor variations in the wording -- at no fewer than fifteen organisations. Some of them were very large. Some of them were spending tens of millions on the transformation programme that the hockey stick was supposed to justify.
The Dangerous Lie Inside the Hockey Stick
Here is what makes the hockey stick genuinely dangerous, not just wrong.
It gives leadership an excuse to accept poor performance for months without intervention.
When the plan shows flat results until Q4, every month of flat results looks like the plan is working. Nobody sounds the alarm. Nobody challenges. Nobody asks the uncomfortable questions. Because the strategy deck predicted this exact trajectory, and questioning it means questioning the strategy.
The hockey stick creates a protected period of zero accountability. A grace period during which the programme is immune from scrutiny because "we always said this phase would be flat."
I saw this destroy a programme at a company I was consulting for. Significant investment in operational transformation. The strategy showed the hockey stick. Month after month, the results were flat. Month after month, the programme leadership pointed to the slide that said this was expected.
Nobody asked: "What specifically will cause the inflection? What will be different in Q4 that is not happening now? What leading indicators should we be tracking to confirm we are on the trajectory?"
Nobody asked because the hockey stick had already answered those questions. "Trust the process. The inflection is coming."
It never came. Because the inflection was never based on anything concrete. It was based on hope, dressed up as a graph.
What Actually Works: The Boring Truth
After 40+ organisations, here is what I have seen actually deliver results. It is profoundly unsexy. It will not make a good strategy slide. But it works.
Monthly targets, not annual ambitions.
Break the annual number into twelve monthly targets. Not by dividing by twelve -- that is lazy and usually wrong. By understanding the improvement pipeline and setting realistic monthly milestones based on which specific projects will deliver in which specific months.
When I was deploying CI at Shell, we did not have a hockey stick. We had monthly delivery targets for each improvement project, each team, each area. Every month, we knew exactly what should have been delivered and we could see immediately whether we were on track.
If a team was behind in month two, we knew in month two. Not in month ten when it was too late to recover.
Lead indicators, not lag indicators.
The hockey stick only shows lag indicators -- the outcomes. Revenue. Savings. Quality metrics. Those are the results. They tell you what already happened.
Lead indicators tell you what is about to happen. Number of improvement projects in the pipeline. Number of root cause analyses completed. Number of countermeasures implemented. Number of processes standardised.
If your lead indicators are healthy, your lag indicators will follow. If your lead indicators are flat, no amount of waiting will produce a hockey stick.
At Johnson Controls, I built a lead indicator dashboard for the CI programme across EMEA and Latin America. Within two months, I could predict which regions would deliver their targets and which would not -- purely based on activity indicators. The regions with strong lead indicators always delivered. The regions with weak lead indicators never did. Not once.
Weekly cadence, not quarterly reviews.
The hockey stick thrives in organisations that only review performance quarterly. Because three months is enough time to convince yourself that flat performance is "building momentum."
Weekly reviews kill the hockey stick. Because every week, you have to answer: "What did we deliver this week? What is on track? What is blocked? What are we doing about it?"
There is no hiding in a weekly cadence. No nine-month grace period. No "the inflection is coming." Either you are delivering or you are not. And if you are not, you find out this week, not this quarter.
Small wins that compound, not big bets that might pay off.
The hockey stick is usually based on a small number of large initiatives that will deliver massive results -- eventually. The problem with large initiatives is that they are complex, slow, and prone to delay.
The alternative is a large number of small improvements delivered consistently. Each one might save $10,000 or $50,000. Individually, not impressive. But fifty of them? A hundred of them? Delivered every month, compounding?
That is how we delivered $400M+ at Shell. Not through five massive projects. Through hundreds of improvements, delivered consistently, sustained through discipline, compounded over years.
The Spreadsheet Test
Here is how you know your strategy has a hockey stick problem.
Open the financial model behind the strategy. Look at the monthly projections. If the numbers are roughly flat for the first six to nine months and then suddenly accelerate, ask one question: "What specific action or event causes the acceleration?"
If the answer is "compound effect" or "the programme will have matured by then" or "the culture change will have taken hold" -- you have a hockey stick problem.
Those are not answers. Those are hopes.
A real answer sounds like: "In month seven, Project Alpha completes and delivers $X. In month eight, the new production line comes online and we capture $Y from the process improvements we have already implemented. In month nine, the supplier renegotiation closes and delivers $Z."
Specific. Named. Dated. Measurable. Traceable to a specific action that someone is accountable for delivering.
If your hockey stick cannot be decomposed into specific, named initiatives with specific delivery dates, it is not a forecast. It is a wish.
The Leadership Failure
I am going to be direct.
The hockey stick persists because it is comfortable. It tells leadership what they want to hear: "Invest now, results later." It removes the pressure to deliver immediately. It creates a narrative that justifies patience -- which is a virtue in life but a failure mode in execution.
The leaders I have worked with who delivered the best results -- at Shell, at Johnson Controls, at the organisations where transformation actually happened -- did not accept hockey sticks. They demanded monthly proof. Weekly proof. They wanted to see lead indicators moving before they believed lag indicators would follow.
They were impatient. Not for results -- for evidence. They wanted to see that the work was happening. That projects were progressing. That barriers were being removed. That the cadence was being maintained.
And when they did not see that evidence? They did not wait for the inflection point. They intervened. Immediately.
That is what separates organisations that deliver from organisations that draw hockey sticks and hope.
How many hockey sticks have you sat through in your career? And how many of them actually materialised? If the answer to the second question is "none" -- why are you still accepting them?
Replace the hockey stick with a real operating rhythm. The Stormholt Performance and Process Management Mastery programme teaches you how to build the cadence that actually delivers results.
https://stormholt.org/products/performance-and-process-management-mastery