The Essential Strategy Formula: Why Purpose, Growth, and Evolution in Equilibrium Changes Everything

By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy

Here’s something I’ve never been able to square.

We have more strategy tools, frameworks, methodologies, and consulting firms than at any other point in business history. The sheer volume of resources dedicated to helping organizations plan their futures is staggering. And yet, according to research from Kaplan and Norton at Harvard Business School, some 90% of organizations still fail to execute their strategies successfully. Ninety percent. That number hasn’t meaningfully budged in decades.

If you’re a CEO or executive director reading that, you already know it’s true. You’ve lived it. You’ve sat through the off-site retreats, hired the consultants, built the binder, cascaded the goals—and watched the whole thing unravel within ninety days. Not because your people didn’t care. But because something structural was missing—something the entire planning process failed to address.

I’ve spent thirty-plus years working in enterprise risk, strategy, and organizational performance. Across every type of organization I’ve touched—tribal governments, publicly traded tech companies, non-profits, universities, federal agencies—the failures ran along identical fault lines. That kind of consistency doesn’t point to an execution problem. It points to a design problem.

The Essential Strategy Formula is my answer to that design problem. It’s what I use with every client. And this is how it works.

The Gap in the Formula

The standard approach to strategic planning moves from vision, mission, and values straight into defining strategic priorities. From there, priorities cascade into initiatives, goals, and tactics, with success measured through lagging indicators like revenue targets, market share, and overhead rates. Variations exist, but the basic framework is the same everywhere.

That framework has a gap in it.

There’s nothing between vision and priorities that creates the necessary context for to determine if those priorities are the right ones. No mechanism for asking whether the plan accounts for what the organization actually needs to thrive—not just what it wants to achieve. The result is strategy that fails to account for internal capacity, authentic purpose alignment, or the organization’s ability to sustain the changes it’s committing to. Those gaps show up during execution—where they’re infinitely harder and more expensive to fix.

I’ve written elsewhere about the scientific reasons this happens—why organizations are living systems, not machines, and why the Newtonian predict-and-control mindset that still dominates strategic planning is fundamentally mismatched to how organizations actually behave. (If you want the deeper story on the physics, start here.) But this piece is about the practical fix. The mechanics. The formula itself.

Three Things Every Organization Needs

I wanted to solve the design problem at the root—not for one type of organization or one industry, but universally. If the failure rate is universal, the fix must be too. So, I started with a different question: what has to be present for any organization to succeed long-term, regardless of what it does, where it operates, or who it serves?

Three things surfaced. Purpose—the reason the organization exists and the cause that connects people to the work. Growth—not just revenue, but the intentional expansion of capacity, capability, and reach. And Evolution—the ability to anticipate and respond to changing conditions so the organization remains relevant over time.

Purpose, Growth, & Evolution managed in Equilibrium.

None of these are revolutionary concepts on their own. Every leader I’ve presented them to recognizes them immediately. But here’s what I found when I looked at how those same leaders were actually building strategy: these three elements almost never showed up together in the plan. In for-profit organizations, growth consumed all the oxygen. In non-profits and government agencies, mission dominated to the exclusion of the other two. And evolution—despite being visible in every SWOT analysis and competitive assessment—almost never made it into strategic priorities at all.

When one pillar dominates at the expense of the others, the consequences are predictable. Organizations grow so fast they outrun their own infrastructure. Employees disconnect because purpose is a poster on the wall rather than a lived experience. Markets shift and the organization can’t respond because nobody was asking the evolution questions. The pattern was unmistakable.

And it pointed to a fourth element that was needed to hold the other three in productive tension.

The Four Rules of Quantum Intelligent Strategy

The Essential Strategy Formula is built on four elements—Purpose, Growth, Evolution, managed in Equilibrium—governed by four rules that guide how leadership teams frame strategic priorities and make decisions. Each rule contains both an internal and external dimension, which is what makes this approach fundamentally different from outside-in planning.

Rule 1: Purpose must be internally compelling and externally valuable in its contribution.

Purpose is not about revenue—revenue is a metric for how well you deliver on purpose. The real work is ensuring that what the organization stands for is authentically meaningful to the people inside as well as those it serves. This is where strategy connects to culture, not as an afterthought, but as a top-level imperative. The guiding questions: What must occur to advance our Vision? What must exist to inspire and cultivate common cause from within?

Rule 2: Growth is intentional, matched by adaptive learning and expansion of capabilities to sustain both speed and scale. 

Most growth strategies are built around revenue targets—a red herring that dismisses the internal growth necessary to sustain external expansion. One of the most devastating strategic mistakes I’ve witnessed is leadership that lets external growth outpace internal readiness—it happens all the time. The guiding questions: Where do we want to grow in terms of impact and reach? Where must we build agility and develop capabilities to support that growth?

Rule 3: Evolution actively anticipates the changing needs and wants of all those who serve and who are served by the organization.

This is the most consistently overlooked dimension in strategy design. There’s a dangerous assumption that evolution is too far on the horizon for current planning cycles. It isn’t. Evolution is about the decisions you make now that determine whether you’ll still be relevant when the future arrives. The guiding questions: How must we evolve to meet anticipated needs of our consumers and market? How must we evolve internally to meet the needs of the organization?

Rule 4: Purpose, Growth, and Evolution are interconnected and exist in a state of dynamic Equilibrium.

Equilibrium is the mechanism that makes the first three work together. This isn’t a conceptual principle—it’s a decision-making discipline. Equilibrium operates during strategy design, allowing leadership to identify which initiatives yield the greatest value across all three pillars. It also operates in real-time: when a new opportunity surfaces, when a crisis hits, the Equilibrium lens asks—does this maintain balance across purpose, growth, and evolution, or does it throw us out of alignment? The guiding questions: Are we balancing strategic priorities across Purpose, Growth, and Evolution? Are strategic decisions being framed through this lens?

Where the People Stuff Lives

For years, I focused on applying PGEE to the business dimensions of strategy. The plans were better designed, more connected to vision, and more resilient. But I kept hitting a wall.

Teams that lacked trust didn’t engage in the hard conversations the framework demanded. Leaders who were personally disconnected from the organization’s purpose couldn’t authentically champion it. And when team dynamics shifted—new hires, departures, life changes—the strategy wobbled regardless of how well it was built.

The breakthrough was recognizing that PGEE isn’t just an organizational framework. It’s a human one. Every individual on a leadership team has their own relationship to purpose, growth, and evolution—and when those personal dimensions are out of balance, it shows up in the strategy. A leader who isn’t personally growing stalls the team. A team that hasn’t found shared purpose can’t build purposeful strategy. An executive who resists personal evolution will resist organizational evolution.

This is why Essential Strategy encompasses team dynamics and leadership development as strategic infrastructure—not remedial intervention. The research confirms it: DDI and EY found that companies that both define and act on purpose outperformed financial markets by 42%. Those with a purpose statement but no action behind it performed at the mean. The spread is extraordinary. Purpose has to be real, and it has to be felt by the people doing the work.

Risk Appetite as a Strategy Discussion

One of the most vexing problems in both enterprise risk management and strategic planning is risk appetite. Most organizations either skip it entirely or treat it as a compliance checkbox. That’s a strategic vulnerability hiding in plain sight. Without defined boundaries, organizations gradually accept incremental increases in exposure—each decision rational in isolation, but the cumulative effect quietly overshoots every limit that was never set.

The Essential Strategy Risk Appetite (ESRA) Framework solves this by tying risk appetite directly to the PGEE foundation. Instead of abstract risk categories, ESRA asks four questions—one aligned to each pillar:

For Purpose: How much do we invest before the cost is too great? This weighs reputation and resources—the tension between fulfilling vision and the spend required to do it.

For Growth: How fast can we get there without sacrificing existing value? This focuses on core competencies, capabilities, and market position—the boundaries that protect what you’ve already built while pursuing what’s next.

For Evolution: To what extent are we willing to change? This examines the impact on culture and industry positioning—how far the organization can stretch without breaking its people or its identity.

And for Equilibrium: What threats have the potential to disrupt the mission-critical path? This final question shifts from lagging performance indicators to leading risk indicators—the early warning signals that something strategy-critical is going sideways.

The result is risk appetite defined in language leadership actually uses, tied to the strategic priorities they’ve already committed to. It transforms risk appetite from something the risk team manages into something the leadership team owns.

A Holistic and Efficient Process

Applying the Essential Strategy Formula follows a deliberate four-phase process: Discovery, Alignment, Pathfinding, and Performance.

Discovery is the intelligence-gathering phase—a 360-degree assessment of the organization that answers a deceptively simple question: are we accomplishing what we said we would? Where the answer is yes, the question becomes how to replicate it. Where it’s no, the question is why. The most common failure in Discovery is failing to challenge assumptions and status quo thinking.

Alignment is where vision, mission, and values get pressure-tested against current reality. Is the stated purpose still authentic? Do the team’s values hold? This is also where leadership team dynamics get examined—because strategy built by a team that lacks trust or honest communication will fail regardless of how elegant the plan looks.

Pathfinding is problem-solving. With the intelligence from Discovery and the grounding from Alignment, the leadership team defines strategic imperatives across Purpose, Growth, and Evolution—then works through the key initiatives, goals, and priorities that support them. This is where the Equilibrium lens does its heaviest lifting, identifying where initiatives overlap across pillars, where gaps exist, and how to allocate resources across the whole. The output is three to six PGE Imperatives with strategic goals, primary metrics, and championed ownership.

Performance is the implementation blueprint—cascading meaning throughout the organization, developing tactical action plans, and defining key performance and risk indicators. The core strategic plan communicates the why and the what. The Performance Blueprint defines the how. Teams almost always plan too aggressively on the first pass, underestimating the capacity needed and the communication effort required to connect every employee to the common cause.

Measuring What Matters: The ESQI 360

A framework is only as good as the intelligence that feeds it. That’s why Essential Strategy includes a dedicated assessment model—the ESQI 360—designed to reveal what is and what is not driving strategic performance from the inside out. Most organizations have no shortage of data. What they lack is a structure for interpreting it through a strategic lens. The ESQI 360, anchored by the PGEE foundation, provides that structure in three layers.

The first layer examines the Operational Core—the inner functioning of the organization itself. This includes the business model and mission-critical systems, the health and capacity of the human asset through culture and learning, and the interlocks that reveal where dots connect, where gaps exist, and where hidden opportunities lie. This is where you find the disconnects between what leadership believes is happening and what’s actually happening on the ground.

The second layer assesses Business Discipline—the level of agility or rigidity in how the organization operates. How well does the structural design of strategy support execution? How well do systems produce results that align with intended outcomes? How clearly is vision articulated and supported through leadership practice? This layer reveals whether the organization’s operating rhythm is helping or hindering its strategic ambitions.

The third layer measures for Quantum Intelligence—the cohesion of purpose across the organization, focused on six attributes that map directly to the PGEE foundation. Aspiration and Alignment support Purpose: how compelling is the cause, and how well are resources deployed behind it? Intelligence and Decisiveness support Growth: how deep is the strategic data, and how effective are the decisions it informs? Navigation and Adaptation support Evolution: how well does the organization monitor performance, and how effectively does it anticipate and manage change?

These six attributes are the vital signs of a quantum intelligent organization. They tell you not just whether your strategy is on track, but whether your organization has the internal capacity to keep it there. Because they’re anchored to the same PGEE framework that drives strategy design, the intelligence feeds directly back into the decisions you make. No translation layer required.

Essential Strategy Formula: The Missing Link

The fundamental flaw in traditional strategic planning isn’t the lack of competent leadership or bad tools. It’s the absence of a framing mechanism between vision and strategic priorities that creates the proper context for building a thriving organization.

Purpose, Growth, and Evolution in dynamic Equilibrium is that missing link.

It doesn’t replace existing planning tools. It creates the foundation that makes all of them work better. When strategic priorities are framed around what must exist for the organization to thrive—not just what it wants to achieve—the intelligence becomes more targeted, the priorities more connected, and the plan more resilient.

I’ve tested this framework across tribal governments, native corporations, publicly traded companies, non-profits, government agencies, churches, and universities. The contexts differ enormously. The formula holds—because purpose, growth, and evolution are universal.

If This Resonates

If you recognize your organization in this—if you’ve been doing all the right things and still watching strategy underperform, or if you’re stepping into a planning cycle and want to approach it differently—the Essential Strategy Formula is a place to start.

I’ve created a Quick Reference Guide that will help you challenge status quo thinking. Want more? Check out the Strategic Health Check to see just how well your current strategy stacks up. They are both free, and designed to give you genuine value whether or not we ever work together.

Ready to build strategy from the inside out? Let’s talk. Reach out at erin@erinsedor.com or visit ErinSedor.com.

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Erin Sedor is an executive advisor and strategic performance expert with 30+ years helping organizations build strategy that actually works. She is the creator of Essential Strategy and the Quantum Intelligence framework for conscious, adaptive leadership.