Most institutions buy advice the way they furnish an office. One firm for the strategy. Another for communications. A third for government relations. A banker somewhere down the corridor. Each is competent, each delivers on time, and each can show you a polished document at the end of it.
And then the plan meets the world, and it breaks in exactly the places where one adviser’s work ended and the next one’s began.
Richard Rumelt, whose Good Strategy Bad Strategy is one of the few business books that deserves its reputation, defines strategy as "coherent action backed by an argument." Read that again, slowly. The argument is not decoration added after the strategy is done. It is half of the strategy. Separate the two and you get one of two things: action nobody has been persuaded to accept, or persuasion with nothing behind it.
We think there are four things that have to move together in any serious public decision: the decision itself, the policy that gives it shape, the message that explains it, and the money that makes it real. What happens when one of them is left behind? We do not have to guess. Governments have run the experiment for us, repeatedly.
Money without evidence
On 23 September 2022, Britain’s new government announced a large package of tax cuts in what it called a "fiscal event" rather than a budget. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the country’s independent fiscal watchdog, had offered to produce a forecast to accompany it. The government declined, and no independent forecast was published.
The markets drew their own conclusions. Three days later the pound fell to 1.0327 dollars, its lowest level since decimalisation in 1971. On 28 September the Bank of England was forced to begin emergency purchases of long-dated government bonds, in its own words "to restore orderly market conditions." Ten days after the announcement, the abolition of the top rate of income tax was reversed. The Chancellor was dismissed after 38 days in the job. On 20 October, Liz Truss announced her resignation.
Was the policy wrong? Economists will argue about that for years. But notice what the markets were reacting to. Not only the numbers, but the absence of an independent account of them. The missing forecast was itself a message, and the message was: we have not shown our working.
Money is an audience too, and it is the least patient one in the room.
Policy without the argument
India’s three farm laws of 2020 began as ordinances in June and were passed by Parliament in September, clearing the Rajya Sabha on a voice vote. Even the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, a farmers’ group linked to the ruling party, had asked for the bills to go to the parliamentary standing committee on agriculture and questioned the haste. The government’s critics accused it of using its majority to push laws through without enough consultation.
What followed was more than a year of farmers camped on the borders of Delhi. The Supreme Court stayed the laws in January 2021. On 19 November 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi went on national television and announced their repeal, saying that perhaps something had been lacking in the government’s efforts, that it could not explain the truth to some of its farmer brothers. Ten days later, Parliament repealed them. The Lok Sabha took about four minutes.
Set aside, for a moment, whether the laws were good policy. Look instead at the admission. A government with a commanding majority, which had won the vote, conceded that it had lost the argument. And the argument was the thing it had never really tried to win before the vote.
A majority can pass a law. It cannot make people accept one.
A decision without the money
In 2021, Sri Lanka’s government banned chemical fertilisers in an attempt to make the country the first in the world to farm entirely organically. The ban took effect that spring. The message was ready, and it was ambitious. What was not ready was the supply. The country’s two million farmers, about 30 percent of its labour force, had depended on subsidised chemical fertiliser, and they said the government neither scaled up organic fertiliser production nor imported enough soil nutrients to replace what it had banned.
The ban was lifted on 1 December 2021. By then the damage was in the fields. In the first three months of 2022, Sri Lanka imported about 300,000 tonnes of rice. In the whole of 2020 it had imported about 14,000 tonnes. That is more than twenty times as much rice in a single quarter as in an entire year. The agriculture minister later said the President agreed the shift had been made too hastily.
A decision without the money to deliver it is only an announcement.
Everything except delivery
The fourth failure is quieter, and increasingly common. The Affordable Care Act had been law for more than three years, and its case had been made to the country again and again. On 1 October 2013, the federal enrolment website opened. According to notes from the government’s own war room, released by the House Oversight Committee, six people managed to enrol on the first day. PolitiFact rated the claim mostly true.
Six. For a programme whose enrolment was meant to be counted in millions.
The policy was there, the money was there, the message was there. What failed was the point at which a citizen actually met the policy, which, in the twenty-first century, is usually a screen. Technology is no longer an implementation detail that comes after the strategy. For most people, it is the policy.
Why institutions still buy them separately
Partly because of the organisation chart. Strategy sits with the chief executive or the cabinet office, communications with the press team, government relations with a different director, finance with the treasury. Each buys its own advice from its own budget, and each adviser is rewarded for doing its own part well.
Partly because it feels safer. Specialists are easier to evaluate than judgment.
But think about what each of those four failures had in common. In none of them was the problem a lack of competent people. Britain had a Treasury full of them. India had a disciplined government with a clear majority. Sri Lanka had a policy goal many people found admirable. The Affordable Care Act had already survived the hardest fight in Washington, which was getting passed. In each case, one part of the machine moved and the others were not moving with it, because no single person was responsible for seeing all of them at once.
That is why we built Exalt with strategy, policy, capital and technology counsel under one roof. Not because one firm should do everything, but because one diagnosis should drive everything. The policy ask, the public argument, the financing and the delivery plan should all be readable as consequences of the same judgment about what the problem is. If the message could have been written without knowing the decision, it is the wrong message. If the decision could have been made without knowing how it will be explained, funded and delivered, it is the wrong decision.
Four things have to move. Buy one, and you have bought a quarter of a plan.
