This page explains what it means to operate at different strategic levels, why people develop a strong preference for one over another, what goes wrong when a leader gets stuck, and the simple mechanism for moving between levels deliberately.
Most leadership advice talks about working on the business rather than in it — the idea that founders should stay at altitude and leave the detail to others. This is useful, but incomplete. The reality is that a business requires strategic thinking at multiple levels simultaneously, and the skill is not simply staying high. It is knowing which level demands your attention right now, and being able to move between them.
What Strategic Levels Actually Are
Think of a business the way you might think of a map. You can zoom out to see the entire country — the broadest possible view of where you are and where you are heading.
You can zoom in to a region, then a city, then a street. Each level of zoom reveals different information. None of them is more real than the others. They are just different resolutions of the same territory.
A business works the same way. At the highest level, you are thinking about overall direction — market position, long-term goals, the shape of the company in two or three years. At the middle levels, you are thinking about how specific functions or projects are being run. At the lower levels, you are in the operational detail — individual tasks, specific problems, day-to-day execution.
Strategy is not exclusive to the top of this map. There is strategic thinking available at every level. The question of how to run a specific project well is a strategic question. So is the question of how to structure a team, or how to handle a particular client relationship. Operating at a lower level does not mean abandoning strategic thinking. It means applying it to a finer resolution.
Why People Develop a Level Preference
Most leaders have a level they find natural and a level they find uncomfortable. This is not random. It tends to come directly from their history.
A founder who came up through a corporate career — who spent years operating at a senior level, thinking about markets and positioning and long-term direction — will find the higher levels familiar and comfortable. That is where they have spent most of their working life. Dropping into operational detail can feel disorienting, even threatening to their sense of identity.
The reverse is equally common. A founder who built their expertise through doing — who knows their industry from the inside, who is used to being the person who solves problems directly — will often find the higher levels uncomfortable. The detail feels safe and concrete. The strategic altitude feels abstract, or even like a form of avoidance.
Neither preference is wrong. Both become a problem when they harden into a fixed position.
“It can be quite a surprise for people to discover that the other levels really exist — that there is genuine thinking to be done there, not just tasks to be managed or vague vision-setting.”
What Goes Wrong at Each Extreme
Stuck too high. A leader who rarely comes down from the higher levels tends to miss what is actually happening in the business at sufficient resolution. Problems that would be visible at a closer zoom level — operational failures, team dysfunction, quality issues, early warning signs — go undetected because the leader is not looking at the right level of detail. The business can look fine from 10,000 feet while things are quietly going wrong underneath.
Stuck too low. A leader who rarely lifts out of the operational detail ends up in a pattern of constant firefighting. The business becomes reactive because nobody is holding the higher-level view consistently enough to anticipate problems before they ignite. At the early stages of a business this may be unavoidable, but as the business grows it becomes increasingly costly — and the only structural fix is hiring someone to provide the strategic capacity the founder is not currently supplying, which is both expensive and difficult.
For ADHD founders specifically, the low-level trap is particularly common. Operational problems are concrete, immediate, and often come with the urgency that ADHD brains find activating. Strategic thinking is slower, less defined, and harder to initiate. The pull toward the detail is strong, and the cost of it only becomes visible over time.
The Three-Level View
The mechanism for moving between strategic levels deliberately is straightforward.
At any given time, your thinking should be anchored to three levels: the level you are currently focused on, the level immediately above it, and the level immediately below it.
If you are thinking about the overall business strategy, you hold that level, the level beneath it — how specific functions or initiatives are being run — and enough awareness of the level above to understand the external context you are operating in.
If you are working through a specific operational problem, you hold that level, the one above it — how this fits into the broader function or project — and the one below it — the specific detail needed to actually resolve it.
This three-level span prevents both traps. It stops you drifting too high by keeping the level below in view. It stops you getting lost in the detail by keeping the level above present. In a larger organisation, you might extend this span slightly — but for most founders, the immediate level above and below is enough.
The practice is simple: before focusing on a problem, consciously identify which level it lives at, and what the levels immediately above and below it look like. This small act of orientation changes the quality of the thinking significantly.
Summary
Every business requires strategic thinking at multiple levels, not just at the top. Most leaders have a level they find natural — shaped by their history and career — and a level they find uncomfortable.
Getting stuck at either extreme creates predictable problems: too high, and you miss what is actually happening; too low, and the business becomes permanently reactive.
The Three-Level View is the mechanism for moving deliberately between levels: anchor your thinking to the level you are working at, the level immediately above it, and the level immediately below. This keeps the broader context present without losing the resolution the current problem requires.