Pillar 05
Culture and Strategy Alignment
Thinking on how organisational culture enables or defeats strategy execution, and the conditions under which the two move together.
Stated Positions on Contested Questions
Team Alignment Is Not Team Building. The Confusion Is Expensive.
When a leadership team is not moving in a common direction, the typical response is to send them on a team-building exercise.…
Culture as a Strategic Asset: What Leaders Who Build It Do Differently
Culture is frequently described as a strategic asset. It is rarely treated as one. The difference between organisations that build culture deliberately and those that merely describe it aspirationally is visible in the specific daily choices their leaders make.
The Strategy Offsite That Changes the Culture vs. The One That Does Not
Most strategy offsites produce a strategy document and return the leadership team to the organisation unchanged. The offsites that actually shift the culture do something different: they make the room honest enough that the leadership team encounters itself, not just its plans.
Why Transformation Programmes Lose Momentum After the First Six Months
The first six months of a transformation programme are typically the easiest. The energy is high, the mandate is clear, the quick wins are available. What happens between month six and month eighteen is where most transformations actually succeed or fail.
Team Alignment Is Not Team Building. The Confusion Is Expensive.
Team building addresses the relational quality of a group. Team alignment addresses the shared understanding of direction, priority, and accountability that allows a group to function as a strategic unit. These are related problems, not the same problem, and the interventions that address them are not interchangeable.
The Values Workshop That Changes Nothing (And the One That Does)
Most values workshops produce a refined set of words. The organisations that have actually shifted their cultures through values work did something different: they built a process for translating aspiration into specific, observable behaviour, and they held people accountable to it.
A Vision Statement Is Not a Strategy. The Gap Between the Two Is Where Execution Dies.
The distinction between vision and strategy is not semantic. Vision describes a destination. Strategy describes a path. Most organisations have invested more in the former than the latter, and the execution gap is the direct consequence.
The Work-Life Balance Debate: A Perspective on Career and Personal Growth
The work-life balance debate misses the point. The real question is whether the work you are doing is worth the life it is costing. Integration, not balance, is what leaders actually navigate.
From the Facilitation Room
When the Senior Team Agrees on the Words but Not on What They Mean
The most dangerous form of misalignment in a leadership team is not open disagreement. It is the agreement on language that conceals genuine differences in what the language means to each person who agreed to it.
What a Values Workshop Actually Produces vs. What Organisations Think It Produces
What happens in the room during a values workshop and what the organisation believes happened are frequently different things. The gap between them is where most values work loses its potential.
The First Day of a Transformation Programme: What I Observe in the Opening Circle
The opening circle of a transformation programme tells you almost everything you need to know about what the programme is working with: the level of genuine buy-in, the distribution of scepticism, and the specific cultural patterns most likely to shape what the programme can produce.
On Facilitating a Leadership Team That Does Not Trust Itself
The leadership team that does not trust itself is the most common team I work with and the most demanding to facilitate. The absence of trust is not always visible. It expresses itself in the quality of the conversations that do not happen.
The Vision Statement That Means Different Things to Different Members of the C-Suite
The vision statement had been agreed. The leadership team had signed off on every word. Three months later, it had produced three different operational strategies in three different functions. The agreement was real. The alignment was not.
Notes from a Three-Day Strategy Alignment Workshop: What the Room Revealed
Three days with a senior leadership team working on strategic alignment. What the process surfaced about the gap between the strategy they believed they had and the strategy they were actually executing.
A Practitioner Lens on Books
Switch by Chip and Dan Heath: The Most Practical Change Management Framework Available and What It Does Not Address
The Heath brothers' 2010 book on change is the most practically useful change management framework in the popular management literature. It is also incomplete in a specific way that matters for the most consequential kinds of organisational change.
Good to Great Twenty Years On: What Collins Got Right About Culture and What the Hedgehog Concept Misses
Jim Collins's 2001 book remains one of the most influential business texts of the past quarter century. Twenty years of subsequent research and organisational experience has confirmed some of its central insights and complicated others.
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