Executive summary. This article argues that strategy education must move beyond teaching analytical frameworks toward developing real strategic competence. In a world shaped by uncertainty, complexity, and AI-driven change, knowing strategy is no longer enough. Learners at all levels need behavioural capabilities that help them interpret reality, shape direction, mobilise others, execute effectively, and adapt over time. The article introduces the Big 5 of Strategy as a coherent, research-based competency framework, and outlines how business education can use it to create more integrated, practical, and future-ready learning experiences. 

Key takeaways

• Knowing strategy is not the same as being strategic: Traditional strategy education overemphasises analytical frameworks, while real-world strategy requires judgment, action, influence, and adaptation in conditions of uncertainty and change. Strategic effectiveness is behavioural, not just cognitive. 
• Strategy is a foundational competency at all levels, not an executive privilege: In today’s distributed and fast-moving organisations, strategic capability is required across roles, industries, and career stages. Strategy must be taught as a practical human skill that professionals can apply daily, not as a top-management abstraction. 
• Competency-based strategy education is essential for an AI-shaped future: As AI increasingly automates analysis, the differentiator shifts to sense-making, direction-setting, mobilisation, execution, and learning. The Big 5 of Strategy provides a coherent, research-backed framework to develop these capabilities in a systematic and future-ready way.

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Why Strategy Education Must Change

For decades, strategy education has been built around introducing students to a wide range of analytical frameworks. From SWOT to Porter’s Five Forces to BCG matrices, many generations of learners have been taught to think strategically by mastering models. These models have value and have shaped managerial thinking around the world for decades. Yet they also reflect a particular worldview: a relatively stable world in which strategic problems are largely linear and analysable.

If ever, this is not what today’s business environment looks like. Students, whether they are undergraduates, MBAs, or executives, work in settings defined by uncertainty, complexity, and change. Strategic challenges unfold faster than analytical frameworks can capture; knowledge quickly becomes outdated, and skills we assumed to be human-only are increasingly replaced by AI.

As a result, employers need employees and leaders who not only understand what strategy is, but to act strategically in ambiguous situations, influence others, and adapt their thinking as circumstances change. This requires much more than familiarity with a set of strategy tools. It requires strategic competence.

As an inheritance from the past, we still associate strategy with the top of the hierarchy, with executive teams and large corporates. Yet, organisations today need strategic competency across all levels: from early-career professionals making daily prioritisation decisions to team leaders interpreting what shifting market signals mean for their team. And not just at large corporations. This shift applies to any type of organisation. In a world of distributed decision-making, strategy can no longer be the exclusive domain of senior executives. It becomes a foundational capability for all.

These developments create a clear challenge for educators: How do we prepare learners not just to analyse organisational strategy, but to practice it confidently in their own jobs on a day-to-day basis?

From Knowing Frameworks to Building Competence

One of the big issues with how strategy has traditionally been taught is its fragmentation. Students receive an assortment of tools and concepts, each valuable on its own but not anchored in a coherent view of what it actually means to be strategic. The result is often a toolkit without a craft. A set of frameworks that are mastered academically but which are not internalised as actual capability. With this, a long-known uncomfortable truth comes clearly to the surface: knowing strategy is not the same as being strategic.

Most strategy courses remain highly analytical, emphasising data over judgment and analysis over action. They focus on knowing about strategy, not on how to be strategic. They give little attention to the interpersonal, behavioural, and adaptive dimensions of strategy, and even less to its contextual nature and relevance at lower levels of the hierarchy. Yet these are precisely the aspects of strategy that determine whether a good analysis turns into effective actions and outcomes.

If strategy is to be more than an intellectual framework-driven exercise and live up to its potential as a driving force for change, we need a shift from the acquisition of knowledge to the development of capability. This requires looking at strategy not just as a siloed discipline, but as a generic set of human competencies that can be developed, assessed, and strengthened over time.

A Competency-based Lens: The Big 5 of Strategy

The Big 5 of Strategy competency framework was developed to provide exactly such a lens. Instead of focusing on tools, it identifies five core competencies that underpin strategic behaviour in dynamic environments:

• Grasp the Present: Making sense of current realities and developments
• Shape the Future: Envisioning and designing what should come next
• Move the System: Understanding and mobilising people to change
• Deliver the Results: Turning ideas into coordinated actions and outcomes
• Adapt to Change: Learning and adjusting as circumstances change

Each competency captures a distinct set of behaviours that together represent the full strategic cycle: understanding, envisioning, mobilising, executing, and learning. Together, they span the entire spectrum of strategic capability: thinking and doing, stabilising and transforming, with adaptability at its core.

Instead of teaching learners to apply a series of strategy tools mechanically, the Big 5 framework encourages them to strengthen the underlying capabilities that make effective strategic behaviour possible. This approach does not replace traditional strategic tools. It contextualises them. Strategy models become resources inside a broader integrative competency framework.

What Research Tells Us

To assess whether these competencies matter beyond their conceptual clarity, a 1,200-person research study was conducted across professionals in multiple sectors, roles, and career stages. The findings were clear: performance in the Big 5 of Strategy competencies strongly correlated with subjective career success, quality of work, and personal growth.

The research also demonstrated that strategic competencies are clearly distinct from personality traits, learning agility, or mindset. They capture something behavioural and developable rather than innate. Furthermore, it was found that the competencies are not related to age or years of experience. This reinforces that strategic capability is not a fixed characteristic or a natural gift. It is a set of learnable competencies that can be intentionally strengthened through education and practice.

Implications for Educators

If strategic competence is a foundational capability of employees across levels and industries, business schools and executive education providers have an important opportunity and responsibility. They can, or even must, help learners build the behavioural capacity to lead in complex environments, not only the cognitive ability to analyse them. Several implications follow, of which I want to highlight three.

Teach Strategy as a Human Skill, Not Just an Analytical Discipline

The Big 5 of Strategy framework encourages educators to broaden the definition of strategy. Analytical skills are crucial. But so are sense-making, creativity, influence, execution, and adaptability. These are skills that can be practised through application, coaching, and reflection. Incorporating behavioural exercises, scenario-based learning, and structured reflection helps students translate frameworks into real strategic behaviour. It makes strategy lived and personal rather than memorised, and for executives or consultants.

Use Assessment as a Developmental Tool

Competency-based models make it possible to assess strategic capability in a structured way. When used responsibly, assessments help learners understand their strengths, blind spots, and development needs. For educators, this provides a rich starting point for teaching. Instead of assuming homogeneous skill levels, programmes can be designed around the actual strategic profiles of learners and their different learning needs. This makes learning more personalised and increases the impact of education.

Connect Strategy Teaching Across the Curriculum

The fragmented nature of strategy teaching through isolated modules and disconnected frameworks can be replaced by a more integrated approach. The Big 5 of Strategy competencies offer a common language that can be used across courses, from marketing to operations to entrepreneurship, and even as the foundation for an entire curriculum. This creates coherence in the learning journey and helps students see strategic proficiency as a cross-disciplinary capability rather than a standalone subject.

A Future-oriented Strategy Education

As AI-driven mass layoffs and rising unemployment among graduates indicate, the old business school curriculum no longer prepares students sufficiently for a successful career. Employers look for people who can interpret complexity, shape direction, build coalitions, act with discipline, and learn continuously. These are not niche leadership qualities. They are fundamental strategic capabilities.

By shifting from teaching strategy as a set of frameworks in a capstone course to developing strategy as a set of competencies, educators can better prepare learners for the realities of modern work. The Big 5 of Strategy provides a practical and research-based lens to do exactly that.

The opportunity for business schools is significant. They can help the next generation of professionals become more confident, more capable, and more prepared for the job market. Not by memorising the models of yesterday, but by strengthening the competencies that will shape tomorrow.