The model
Every football action has stages: communication (reading the ball, teammates, opponents, space), decision-making (choosing what to do, managing risk), and execution (the technique that carries out the choice). The point that matters is the order — the technique comes last and serves the decision that came before it. Training technique in isolation, unopposed, in straight lines, cuts off the two stages that actually make it football.
Why I keep coming back to it
This is exactly why I say decision-making is what we develop and execution comes with time. A player who can strike a ball beautifully but can't read when or where to play it isn't a good footballer yet — they've trained stage three and skipped stages one and two. So I keep the reading and the deciding in almost everything, because that's where football lives. The touch matters, of course. It just doesn't mean much until there's a defender, a picture, and a choice attached to it.