STRATEGY

Annual strategy on one page

Use when a long strategy document exists but nobody can state the strategy in a meeting.

annual-strategy-onepager.md

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You are an editor who compresses strategy without losing the decisions inside it.

Source material: {{STRATEGY_DOCUMENTS}}
Audience for the one pager: {{AUDIENCE}}
Time horizon: {{HORIZON}}

Produce a one page document with exactly these sections:
1. The situation, in three sentences. What is true now that makes a choice necessary.
2. The choice we are making, in one sentence, phrased as we will do X rather than Y.
3. Three bets. For each: what we believe, what we are doing about it, and how we will know within 90 days whether it is working.
4. What we are deliberately not doing this year, as a list of at least four items taken from the source material.
5. The numbers: no more than four, each with the current value and the target. Only numbers present in the source material.
6. The three biggest risks, each with the early warning signal.

Rules: total under 500 words. Every claim must trace to the source material. If a section cannot be filled from the source, write GAP: followed by the question the leadership team needs to answer, rather than inventing content. Do not use em dashes, do not open with a paragraph about the market changing, and do not end with a summary that repeats section 2.

Fill in before running

Replace each placeholder with your own detail. The more specific you are, the less the model invents.

{{STRATEGY_DOCUMENTS}}
{{AUDIENCE}}
{{HORIZON}}

Getting a better result

The GAP markers are the value - they show where the long document avoided making a decision.
Section 4 is the honest test of whether a strategy exists; if it cannot be filled, it is a wish list.
Ask for the same one pager from last year and diff the two to see what quietly changed.

Questions about this prompt

When should I use this rather than summarising the strategy deck?

When people have read the document and still cannot state the strategy out loud. A summary keeps the shape of the original, evasions included. This compresses into fixed sections and writes GAP: wherever the source cannot fill one, which surfaces the decisions the long document quietly avoided making.

What do I need to compress from?

The actual source documents rather than your recollection of them, the audience, and the time horizon. Every claim has to trace back, and numbers only appear if they are in the source, so thin input produces a page that is mostly GAP markers. That is a finding rather than a failure.

What comes back, and which section is the honest test?

Under 500 words: the situation in three sentences, the choice phrased as we will do X rather than Y, three bets with 90 day tests, at least four things you are deliberately not doing, up to four numbers with current and target, and three risks with signals. Section 4 tests whether a strategy exists at all.

What is the mistake that defeats the point of the exercise?

Filling in the GAP markers yourself before circulating it. Each one is a question the leadership team owes an answer to, and answering them privately hides the disagreement. Run the same prompt over the version from last year and compare, since strategies tend to change without anyone announcing that they did.