🚗 All Brakes, No Drive 🛑 - PMO Governance Business Agility
There's a very specific kind of pride that comes from bolting a tenth brake caliper onto a car that already has nine. The PMOs standing there with a clipboard, genuinely delighted, surveying their work like they just finished a safety recall on a vehicle that was never actually moving to begin with. Meanwhile the driver's revving an engine that's going absolutely nowhere, boxed in by hardware, staring at a finish line thats gotten smaller, not closer, with every review board that got added.
This usually isn't malice, it's muscle memory. When a PMO gets elevated to an enterprise level function, it often brings the exact same mindset and rigid governance controls that worked at a smaller scale, and just applies them wider. More scope, same instincts, same stage gates, same sign offs, now stamped across the entire organization instead of one program. That's the trap Principle 2, Establish an Enterprise Function to Orchestrate Strategy Execution, warns against. The Strategy Execution Office has to behave differently than the PMO it evolved from, not just operate at a bigger scale with the same reflexes.
Good brakes are what let a driver go faster with confidence (PMO Governance Business Agility), not what keeps the car parked. The right model is minimal enterprise standards and guidelines, paired with genuine autonomy for execution within and across the critical functions. Governance exists to give the organization confidence to move quickly, not permission to move slowly and call it discipline. If the SEO's actual output is slower time to market and reduced business agility, the governance isn't protecting the business, its the thing the business needs protecting from.
The 10 Key Principles of Strategy Execution aren't something we came up with on our own. They're being defined in the open by the StrategyXF community, multi disciplinary leaders and practitioners across Strategy, Operations, Finance, HR, Architecture, Transformation, PMO, Delivery, and Change Management, naming the real challenges holding organizations back and sharing what's actually worked.
How many sets of brakes has your organizations governance model bolted on, and how far has the car actually moved?👇Â
StrategyXF Painfully Accurate Series (Sad, but True!)
This cartoon is part of Painfully Accurate, a StrategyXF series built from real Strategy Execution challenges our members have actually lived through, laughed about, and found a way past.
Every scene started as something a leader or practitioner described, not a hypothetical, an actual moment somebody in this community said out loud and everyone else in the room recognized instantly. Sad but true, every one of them, and every one of them survivable.
If any of this feels a little too familiar, you're exactly who this community was built for. Join StrategyXF and help us turn these shared war stories into the practical, personalized strategies that finally put them behind us.
