While I’ve generally found explore, diagnose, refine, policy, and operation to work well for writing policy, I’ve consistently found it a poor format for presenting strategy. Whether I’m presenting a strategy for review or rolling the strategy out to be followed by the wider organizaton, I recommend an inverted structure:

• Policy: what does the strategy require or allow? • Operation: how is the strategy enforced and carried out, how do I get exceptions for the policy? • Refine: what were the load-bearing details that informed the strategy? • Diagnose: what are the more generalized trends and observations that steered the thinking? • Explore: what is the high-level, wide-ranging context that we brought into creating this strategy?