Minimal Viable Strategy & The Art of Strategic Simplicity

In late 2001, the corporate world watched as Enron––an energy behemoth with reported revenues exceeding $100 billion––filed for what was then the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. The immediate story was one of staggering fraud, although beneath the headlines lay a more instructive failure: Enron was a casualty of its own weaponised complexity.

The company’s strategy was intentionally labyrinthine, built on a web of over 3,500 partnerships designed to conceal massive debt and inflate earnings. This financial architecture was so bewildering that it obscured reality, paralysed decision-making, and ultimately became a mechanism for self-destruction. The Enron saga serves as the ultimate cautionary tale for a problem that plagues countless organisations: Why do so many well-funded, intelligent business strategies fail?

The answer is often not a lack of ambition, but an excess of complexity. This article will argue that the antidote is not a more detailed plan, but a radically simpler one: the Minimal Viable Strategy (the MVS).

I. The Core Idea

Why Your Business Plan is Already Obsolete

The traditional business plan––a dense, hundred-page document filled with five-year forecasts and exhaustive market analysis––is a relic of a slower-paced era. In today's markets, such static documents are obsolete before the ink is dry. The pursuit of comprehensive detail creates a plan that is difficult to communicate, impossible to remember, and too rigid to adapt. This complexity leads directly to a lack of clarity, misaligned goals, and widespread confusion about priorities, the very issues that undermine execution.

The data is clear: strategic clarity accounts for as much as 31% of the performance difference between high- and low-performing organisations.

The solution is not to build a better plan, but to engineer a simpler one. The central thesis of the Minimal Viable Strategy.

The MVS is the simplest possible articulation of a business strategy that contains only the essential elements required to create value, guide action, and generate feedback. It is a dynamic, living framework, not a static document locked in a file cabinet. The core principle of the MVS is the direct application of a 700-year-old mental model: This principle––famously articulated as Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity)––argues that

when faced with competing explanations, the one with the fewest assumptions should be preferred.

Applied to strategy, this means ruthlessly "shaving away" unnecessary initiatives, vanity metrics, and ambiguous objectives until only the critical components remain. The name deliberately echoes the MVP from the lean startup methodology. Just as an MVP is the simplest version of a product that can be launched to gather real user feedback, the MVS is the simplest version of a strategy that can be deployed to gather real market feedback in the form of tangible results. It replaces exhaustive upfront planning with a focused framework for action and rapid iteration.

II. The Everyday Analogy

The Michelin Kitchen's Focus vs. The Boardroom's Fog

To grasp the power of the Minimal Viable Strategy, consider the contrast between two high-stakes environments: the corporate boardroom and the three-Michelin-star kitchen.

Imagine a typical corporate strategy off-site. The process culminates in a sprawling PowerPoint deck and a thick binder. It’s filled with SWOT analyses, five-forces diagrams, balanced scorecards, and a dozen strategic pillars. The language is a thicket of jargon: synergising core competencies, leveraging paradigms, optimising value streams.

The sheer volume of initiatives creates conflicting priorities. When the plan is distributed, employees struggle to see how their daily tasks connect to these lofty, abstract goals. This is the Boardroom's Fog: complexity without clarity, a strategy that is admired for its thoroughness but is ultimately unactionable.

Now, step into the kitchen of a world-class restaurant during the dinner rush. The environment is incredibly complicated, with dozens of cooks, stations, and processes working in frantic, synchronised harmony. Yet, the "strategy" is brutally simple and universally understood. Every single person in that kitchen––from the executive chef to the newest apprentice––can articulate the plan without hesitation.

1. Source the absolute best ingredients (Key Resources).

2. Execute the established recipe with technical perfection (Key Activities).

3. Create a transcendent dish that delights the guest (Value Proposition).

4. Serve the discerning diner who pays for this experience (Customer Segment).

   
   

There is no fog. The strategy is not in a binder; it is embedded in every action. This is functional simplicity. The kitchen is a high-performing system not because it has a 100-page plan, but because it has a Minimal Viable Strategy that is clear, focused, and relentlessly executed.

The Michelin kitchen is complicated; it involves many specialised, interconnected parts that follow knowable rules and repeatable processes.

A bad business strategy, however, is complex. A tangled web of ambiguous goals, unpredictable interactions, and unclear causality.

Leaders often mistake the creation of complicated plans (adding more initiatives, more metrics, more slides) for the mastery of complexity.

Mastering complexity requires reducing it to a set of simple, robust, and non-negotiable core principles, much as a master chef relies on fundamental techniques rather than an overwrought recipe. The goal of an MVS is to transform an unmanageable complex problem into a merely complicated one that can be solved with process and clarity.

III. The Practical Toolkit

How to Build Your Minimal Viable Strategy

Applying Occam's Razor (that's what the heuristic is called), to strategy development is a discipline of subtraction. The guiding question for every component of the plan must be: Is this absolutely essential for success? The objective is to arrive at a strategy where, as the old design adage goes, there is nothing left to take away. This five-step process provides a framework for building your own MVS.

We have this as a text version, or you can create your own and download it from the tool below.

Define the Core Value Proposition (The 'Why')

This is the North Star of your strategy. It must be a single, clear, and compelling statement that articulates the unique value your organisation delivers to a specific market. This step merges the purpose of a mission statement with the aspiration of a vision statement into an actionable declaration. Avoid corporate jargon and use plain, powerful language. The ultimate test is simple: can every employee––from the CEO to a new hire––repeat it and understand what it means for their work?

Identify the Critical Few Objectives (The 'How')

With the 'Why' established, the next step is to strip the 'How' down to its bare essentials. Instead of a dozen strategic pillars, identify the top three to five core objectives that the organisation must achieve over the next 12 to 24 months to deliver on its value proposition. This ruthless prioritisation prevents the dilution of effort and ensures that resources are not spread thinly across competing priorities. Each objective must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) that directly supports the value proposition.

Isolate Key Activities & Resources (The 'What')

For each of the critical objectives, list the absolute minimum key activities required to achieve it. This is not a comprehensive project plan but a high-level list of the most crucial actions. Alongside these activities, identify the key resources, such as specific staff, capital, or intellectual property, that are indispensable. This step is about identifying the 20% of activities that will drive 80% of the results. If an activity is a "nice to have," it is eliminated. This focus dramatically simplifies resource allocation decisions.

Articulate the Revenue Logic & Target Customer (The 'Who Pays')

A strategy without a clear commercial model is a hypothesis. This step grounds the MVS in reality by forcing clarity on two fundamental questions:

• Who is the specific target customer segment the organisation will serve? Being precise is critical; a business for everybody is often a business for nobody.

• How will the company make money? Define the primary revenue streams, whether through direct sales, subscriptions, or other models.

Establish the Feedback & Iteration Loop (The 'How We Learn')

This final step makes the strategy dynamic. Define a small number of Key Performance Indicators that will directly track progress against the core objectives identified in Step 2. Then, establish a non-negotiable, regular cadence (e.g., monthly or quarterly) for reviewing these KPIs and assessing the strategy's effectiveness. This feedback loop, inspired by Agile methodologies, allows the organisation to iterate and adapt its strategy based on real-world results rather than outdated assumptions.

IV. The Deeper Dive

From Medieval Logic to Modern Health

The principle powering the Minimal Viable Strategy is a powerful heuristic with a history stretching back centuries. Known as Occam's Razor or the Law of Parsimony, its central idea, that simplicity is a virtue in explanation, has roots in ancient philosophy. Aristotle argued for preferring demonstrations that derive from "fewer postulates or hypotheses," and the 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote, "it is superfluous to do with many what can be done with few".

The principle is named after William of Ockham, a brilliant and controversial English Franciscan friar and philosopher. While he did not invent the concept, he wielded it so relentlessly against the convoluted scholastic philosophies of his era that it became his intellectual signature. His formulation,

Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate  (Plurality must never be posited without necessity)

was a tool for cutting away unnecessary metaphysical assumptions. Over time, this philosophical razor was adopted into the scientific method, championed by figures like Isaac Newton and serving as a guiding heuristic in the development of groundbreaking theories like special relativity and quantum mechanics.

While its origins are philosophical, the razor's most compelling modern validation comes from data-driven fields where human behaviour is a critical factor, such as health and finance.

Medication non-adherence is a critical healthcare issue, leading to 125,000 deaths and costing over $290 billion annually in the U.S. Approximately half of all patients with chronic conditions do not take their medications as prescribed, often due to the complexity of their treatment plan. The solution is simplicity. Research consistently shows an inverse relationship between regimen complexity and patient adherence. A key study found adherence rates fall dramatically as dosage frequency increases: 73% of patients complied with a once-daily schedule, but only 32% did for a four-times-daily regimen. A meta review of 17 studies confirmed that simplifying treatments by reducing pill counts or consolidating doses consistently improves adherence and leads to better clinical outcomes, such as improved viral suppression in HIV patients and lower hospitalisation risks for cardiovascular patients.

Just as with health, simplicity is key in personal finance, where an overwhelming number of investment choices often leads to anxiety and inaction—a phenomenon known as the "Paradox of Choice." Data consistently shows that a simpler approach is more effective. The Jam Study: A classic experiment demonstrated that a grocery display with only 6 types of jam resulted in ten times more purchases than a display with 24. While more options attract attention, fewer options motivate action.  
Pension Plans: An analysis found that complex, actively managed public pension plans performed virtually identically to a simple 60/40 stock-and-bond index portfolio since 2000, despite incurring much higher fees. 
Retirement Plans: Defaulting employees into simple target-date funds has proven far more effective at achieving proper diversification than providing a massive menu of funds, which often leads to poor allocation or investor paralysis.

These examples from medicine and finance reveal a deeper truth about the application of Occam's Razor to human systems. Its power lies not just in finding the most "correct" explanation, but in designing simpler systems that make the right behaviour the path of least resistance. A simpler drug regimen doesn't work because it's philosophically more elegant; it works because it reduces the cognitive friction for the patient.

A simpler investment lineup is more effective because it lowers the barrier to making a sound decision. In this context, simplicity is a form of choice architecture, a deliberate design that accounts for the real-world limitations of human psychology. When applied to business, a Minimal Viable Strategy functions as a similar behavioural intervention.

By radically simplifying the plan, it reduces the cognitive load on every employee, making it easier for them to understand their role, align their actions, and make better, faster decisions.

V. The Advanced Context

When a Razor is a Dangerous Tool

A critical analysis of Occam's Razor demands a clear-eyed look at its limitations. The principle is a heuristic, a useful rule of thumb, not an infallible law of nature. The simplest explanation is often, but not always, the correct one. There is no empirical proof that the universe is inherently simple; in fact, many scientific theories have necessarily grown more complex as our understanding has deepened.

In medicine, a dogmatic adherence to the razor can be dangerous. The principle is countered by a well-known clinical aphorism, Hickam's Dictum, which states: A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases. This serves as a vital reminder that a patient presenting with multiple symptoms may not have a single, elegant unifying diagnosis, but several concurrent and unrelated conditions. This is particularly true for older patients with multiple comorbidities, where assuming a single cause can lead to critical diagnostic errors. One documented case study, for example, describes a patient who presented with two simultaneous and independent rare tumours; seeking a single, simple explanation would have been a fatal misstep.

To apply the Razor wisely, especially in complex domains like business strategy, it must be paired with other, more nuanced concepts. One of the most powerful is CLT: our working memory, the mental workspace where we process information, is extremely limited.

The theory identifies three types of load:

1. Intrinsic Load: The inherent difficulty of the subject matter itself.

2. Extraneous Load: The mental effort required to process the way information is presented. Poorly designed instructions, jargon, and clutter all increase extraneous load.

3. Germane Load: The effort dedicated to processing information, constructing mental models (schemas), and transferring knowledge to long-term memory.

A complex, poorly communicated business strategy maximises Extraneous Cognitive Load. It forces employees to waste precious mental energy just trying to decipher the plan (possibly acting that they completely understand), leaving no capacity for the Germane Load required to actually understand, internalise, and execute it. The Minimal Viable Strategy is, in effect, a tool explicitly designed to minimise Extraneous Load, freeing up the organisation's collective cognitive capacity to focus on what matters.

This brings us to the crucial counter-balance to Occam's Razor, a principle often attributed to Albert Einstein:

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

This is the key to avoiding dangerous oversimplification. The goal is not simplicity for its own sake, but the optimal balance between parsimony and adequacy. This balance can be visualised as the Parsimony Frontier.

On one side of this frontier lies the Enron Zone, where excessive complexity destroys value and obscures truth. On the other side lies the Zone of Oversimplification, where the strategy is too stripped-down to accurately represent reality or guide effective action.

The Minimal Viable Strategy is the disciplined practice of operating directly on that frontier.

The razor, therefore, should not be treated as a dogma, but as a discipline. The MVS is not about being simplistic; it is about embracing simplicity as a rigorous and continuous process. It demands that leaders constantly question assumptions, challenge complexity, and strip away the non-essential to maintain clarity and focus. The true power of Occam's Razor in strategy is not as a rule for finding the one right answer, but as a tool for constantly asking the most powerful question: Is this truly necessary?

Sources, Further Reading & Disclaimer

---

We appreciate you subscribing (below) it allows us to:

1. Publish new Mental Models every week.

2. Remain 100% independent and ad-free.

3. Grow our library of resources for the community.