Strategy Review

Pressure-test strategy documents to find where they'll break before reality does it for you. The primary job isn't to evaluate prose quality or check formatting — it's to find the gaps, hidden failure paths, and under-accounted risks that will kill the strategy in execution. A strategy that survives this review has a meaningfully better chance of surviving contact with the real world.

This skill complements the strategy-interview skill. Strategy-interview helps build a strategy through guided conversation; strategy-review subjects an existing strategy to rigorous adversarial evaluation using the same kernel framework (diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions) and bad-strategy filter.

What makes this different from generic feedback

Most strategy feedback falls into two useless categories: vague praise ("this is really thoughtful") or surface-level nitpicking ("consider adding a timeline"). Neither helps the author see whether their thinking actually holds up under stress.

This review does three things that generic feedback doesn't:

Tests structural integrity — whether the logical chain from diagnosis through guiding policy to coherent actions actually holds together, or whether the "therefore" between them is secretly an "and also."
Hunts for failure paths — not just what's wrong with the document, but what goes wrong in the real world because of what's missing. The slow drift scenario, the capability gap that stalls the load-bearing action, the competitor response nobody modeled, the political resistance the strategy pretends doesn't exist.
Surfaces invisible assumptions — every strategy is a bet, but most strategies don't name their bets. This review finds the load-bearing assumptions the author hasn't stated and maps the risk of each one being wrong.

Before you start

Read references/review-dimensions.md — it contains the seven evaluation dimensions and their criteria. This is the backbone of the review. Keep it in working memory throughout.