🪑 Nobody Budgeted For A Bigger Table 📋- Enterprise Function to Orchestrate Strategy Execution
It's that time of year again. Annual planning season, when the calendar quietly turns and every function in the building simultaneously remembers it has opinions about strategy. This scene is all too familiar. Look at that door. PMO, Architecture, Change Management, IT, Finance, and HR are all showing up at once, each one holding their nameplate up like a boarding pass, each one completely convinced they belong in this meeting. Somebody's already dragging in a folding chair from the hallway with a handwritten sign taped to it that just says "I'll make it work." Nobody's wrong to want a seat. Nobody planned for six of them to want it at the same time.
This is what happens when an organization genuinely commits to cross functional input on strategy without actually designing for it. Every function closest to delivery, dependency, and change has real insight the C-Suite needs, and wanting that insight in the room is exactly the right instinct. The problem is that wanting more voices and building a structure that can actually hold them are two different commitments, and most organizations only make the first one, usually right around the same week every year.
That's precisely why Principle 2 of the 10 Key Principles of Strategy Execution, Establish an Enterprise Function to Orchestrate Strategy Execution, exists. A seat at the table isn't the same as a functioning table. Without a defined operating model, clear roles, and a forum actually built to hold that many perspectives, "more voices in the room" turns into more elbows in the room, real quick. The Strategy Execution Office's job isn't to keep people out, it's to build the table, and the process, that can actually hold everyone who belongs in it, so it doesn't feel like this every single January.
The 10 Key Principles 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 from Strategy, Operations, Finance, HR, Architecture, Transformation, PMO, Delivery, and Change Management, coming together to name the real challenges holding organizations back from mastering Strategy Execution, and to share what's actually worked. This scene came directly from that conversation.
Where has your organization tried to open up strategic planning to more functions, only to realize nobody built the structure to actually hold them all?👇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.
