Does your strategy have a dark side?

Written By Elizabeth Rapoport

I've spent the last 20 years thinking about strategy for cities and the built environment in one way or another. Done well, strategy provides enormous benefits: it aligns priorities, builds consensus, and creates a clear framework for decision-making. A strong, inspiring strategy can attract the right partners, resources, and talent. When it includes a spatial vision, it can also guide physical development to serve broader societal goals. Yet, many strategies fail to deliver these benefits. Over the years, I’ve encountered three types:

Bookshelf Strategies. We all know these— beautifully written but utterly impractical. Without a clear path to implementation, they gather dust. I once met the head of an African city’s planning department who showed me a shelf full of consultant-produced masterplans. With only two staff members, he had no way to act on them. Well-intentioned funders love supporting under-resourced organisations to create these plans, but too often, they end up as expensive doorstops.

Performative Strategies. These are strategies aren’t meant to be implemented at all. I discovered these in my doctoral research on sustainable masterplans. I found that many "eco-city" masterplans were never intended to actually guide real development. Instead, they served largely as marketing tools to secure political support and investment.

The final category is the one that I find the most insidious: decoy strategies. If bookshelf and performative strategies are wasteful but harmless, decoy strategies are far worse. These look credible from the outside but mask deeper dysfunctions, sometimes causing real harm to the places or organisations they claim to serve. These types of strategies have a real dark side. They don’t just fail—they actively create problems. How do you know if you have one? I find they often have two traits.

Ambiguous Language. Many strategies in the built environment use terms like "communities," "social value," or "low-carbon" without defining what they actually mean for the organisation or project. These words can be interpreted in multiple ways, but people won’t always be aware that their interpretation of the word is not shared by others. Ambiguity creates the illusion of agreement that masks different interpretations of what a strategy is actually saying. When it's time to put the strategy into action, these disagreements surface. If they can’t be resolved, the organisation will struggle to achieve its objectives. In many cases, this vagueness is intentional—used to smooth over disagreements so a strategy can be approved. That might work if the goal is simply to have a strategy, but it’s a disaster if the goal is to use it effectively.

Competing Objectives. A common approach to dealing with multiple priorities in strategy development is to try to make everyone happy by including all of their wishes rather than making the difficult decisions about what is actually most important. As James Clear notes, “priority” was singular until the 1900s when we decided we could have multiple first things. I see this all the time: strategies promising both economic growth and carbon reduction, deep community engagement and rapid development. These goals aren’t inherently incompatible, but they create tension. Without clear priorities and how you will make decisions when choices have to be made, conflicts get hashed out on a case by case basis—often at great cost.

So why does this matter? A strategy with a dark side damages credibility and erodes trust—both in organisations and the people who create them. For those of us who care about creating places that are inclusive, climate ready and deliver more than just raw economic value, we can’t afford to offer more fodder to the cynics. There is a growing backlash against what we do. Stemming it requires not just setting ambitious strategies, but actually delivering on them.

So how can you keep your strategy away from the dark side? Here are a few tips from my experience.

  • Acknowledge contradictions and agree on how to navigate them. If your strategy prioritizes both maximizing financial returns and reducing carbon emissions, how will you handle conflicts between the two? Decide in advance how trade-offs will be managed.

  • Define your terms. If your goal is to deliver social value, does everyone in your organization understand what that means? If you commit to being a net-zero organization, clarify whether that includes Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions and whether offsets will be used. Align performance measures with your definitions.

  • Prioritise process as much as product. Use strategy development as an opportunity to gather diverse perspectives, surface disagreements, identify key risks and work through them. Doing this upfront will save time later.

  • Build in flexibility. Allow your strategy to evolve over time. One way to do this is by setting clear strategic commitments while keeping the how flexible through an action plan that can be regularly updated.

  • Focus on what your organization can truly influence. Apply Steven Covey’s circles of concern and influence to ensure your strategy emphasizes areas where you have real control. Avoid language that suggests authority over things beyond your reach.

  • Align resources with ambition. Bold commitments require real backing. Before making sweeping statements, ensure you have the necessary resources secured—and a firm commitment to protecting them over the required timeframe.

References, inspiration and further reading

This blog was informed and inspired by many things I’ve read, researched and worked on over the last 15 years as an academic, consultant and public official. Some of the reading that has inspired me:

Elizabeth Rapoport
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