Beyond Coordination Measurement: Improving Strategy Execution and Organisational Value, by Travis Soutter
Measuring coordination isn't the finish line. The value comes from using what it reveals to change the decisions that actually get made.
Visibility is only the beginning. This Member Insight, the fourth in Travis Soutter's series, takes on the question every practitioner eventually asks about measurement, which is what actually changes. It explores how understanding the constraints, incentives and assumptions behind organizational decisions can sharpen strategic trade-offs and strengthen the management and governance frameworks you already have.
The challenge behind this piece came from inside this community. After Travis's last case study, members pushed on the real test, which is whether that understanding improves how competing priorities get resolved, how decisions are implemented and whether performance is sustained. Travis took the challenge head on, and the answer reaches all the way back to whether the strategy itself is realistic.
This Member Insight (Beyond Coordination Measurement) comes from Travis Soutter, founder of Concordia and a founding member of The Strategy eXecution Forum.
StrategyXF Member Insights: Beyond Coordination Measurement
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Measurement alone doesn't improve performance
Travis's earlier work introduced coordinated decision making as a capability conventional management approaches have left largely invisible, and showed how recurring decision tendencies can be assessed and mapped against strategic intent. A follow-up case study combined that evidence with an established management standard. Both drew the same response. Knowing where decisions diverge from intent is useful, but only if it changes how trade-offs get made. This piece goes after the why behind the divergence, and grounds the opportunity in research from McKinsey and Bain on the value organizations lose to ineffective execution and unmanaged complexity.
From strategic signal to organizational decision
Travis uses the S.I.D.E. model (Signal, Interpretation, Decision, Execution) to trace how strategic intent travels through an organization. A documented strategy is the signal. What happens next depends on how each function interprets it, given the information it has, the pressures it faces and what it is accountable for. Those interpretations drive trade-offs, and trade-offs become execution. A clearly written strategy doesn't guarantee that everyone reads its implications the same way, and individually reasonable decisions can add up to an organization drifting away from its own intent.
StrategyXF Member Insights: The Management Blindspot
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Understanding why decisions diverge
Divergence isn't automatically a problem. Different functions legitimately weigh priorities differently. The concern is when differences in interpretation produce trade-offs that cut against the organization's intended objectives, risk tolerance or wider interests. That's why improving coordination can't be reduced to getting everyone to agree, because an organization can agree perfectly on the wrong priorities. The real value is telling healthy differences from the ones that quietly erode the balance of cost, risk and benefit over time, then changing the conditions producing them rather than expecting people to deliver different outcomes under the same constraints.
From the Insight, "Understanding and measuring coordination may be valuable, but measurement alone does not improve organisational performance."
What this looked like in practice
Travis returns to a public sector organization that had made real progress implementing a management framework built on recognized international standards, yet kept finding gaps between intent and practice. Looking at how stakeholders resolved competing priorities revealed recurring leanings toward short-term demands, cost containment and managing risk within individual areas, with very little consistency in how declared objectives translated into everyday priorities. People weren't ignoring the framework. They were responding more consistently to the pressures they actually lived with than to the principles the system was meant to establish. That moves the question from who needs to perform better to which conditions need to change.
Sometimes the strategy is the problem
The piece also raises a challenge that often goes unspoken. A strategy can be financially consistent on paper without the organization having the capability, resources or time to deliver it. Compress the timeline without adding capability and people find other ways to hit the target, deferring work, redirecting resources or accepting more risk. Targets get met today while cost, risk and volatility move into the future. Tighter controls and more accountability won't fix that. Evidence from how decisions are really being made can show when the assumptions behind the strategy need to be reconsidered, so strategy and execution inform one another.
StrategyXF Member Insights: Beyond Coordination Measurement
Already a member? Read the full Guide
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Why StrategyXF is sharing this
StrategyXF exists to elevate Strategy Execution as a C-Suite imperative, and this fourth piece in Travis's series moves from seeing the problem to acting on it. It shows how coordination insight can feed the strategic and performance reviews leaders already run, so strategy and execution learn from each other and the organization adapts as conditions change. It doesn't replace governance, strategy or risk management. It helps them recover value that would otherwise go unrealized.
Have your own hard-won insights on strategy execution? We publish member thinking in the Resource Center and feature the best of it here on www.strategyxf.com. Reach out if you'd like to contribute.
We'd love to hear how your organization turns visibility into better decisions.
About the author.
Travis Soutter is the founder of Concordia and a founding member of The Strategy eXecution Forum, and a researcher in complexity, human coordination and strategy execution.
His work draws on frameworks developed through Concordia's applied research into how human interpretation shapes organisational decision-making and value delivery.
Join The Strategy eXecution Forum
The Strategy eXecution Forum (StrategyXF) is an invite-only, no-fee professional community built by and for practitioners who understand the challenges of closing the persistent gap between strategy and results. We believe it requires a collective effort to master strategy execution. StrategyXF brings together senior leaders from across the enterprise: C-suite executives, Strategy & Operations leaders, Transformation Offices, Finance, HR, IT, PMO, Enterprise Risk, Change Management, Portfolio Management, Business Architecture, and more.
Together, we collaborate on real-world challenges, share proven approaches, and shape the future of disciplined and impactful organizational execution. This is not a passive network; it is a practitioner-led community where your experience adds real value. Every discussion is designed to deliver practical ideas you can apply immediately. If you are serious about elevating strategy execution as a mission-critical discipline, we invite you to apply to become a member and help us build something the profession has long needed.
