👀 The 70% Nobody's Watching 🕶️- Operational Spend Strategy Alignment
Somewhere in every org there's a small, beautifully lit stage where 30% of spend gets a dashboard, a governance framework, and its own spotlight, like it just won an award. And somewhere behind that stage, in the dark, 70% of spend is sprinting around with a cart full of "unplanned work," dodging "changing priorities" signs, occasionally yelling "reactive mode" like it's a battle cry. Nobody's checked on it in months. Nobody's entirely sure it's still going in the same direction it started.
This isn't just a fun visual, it's basically an audit finding waiting to happen. Most organizations build beautiful governance for the 30% because it's visible, funded, and easy to defend in a steering committee. The other 70%, the actual majority of spend, runs on muscle memory and whatever fire showed up that week, because nobody built a way to see it, let alone question whether it's still pointed at the strategy.
That's exactly what Principle 4 of the 10 Key Principles of Strategy Execution, Map and Optimize the Organizational Operating Blueprint, exists to fix. It's not only about defining a target state operating model aligned with strategy. It means the Op Model and Architecture teams working shoulder to shoulder with Finance to rebuild budgeting itself, so operational spend finally gets pulled out of the dark and held to the same strategic scrutiny as the shiny 30% on the pedestal.
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's the 70% running loose in your organization, and has anyone dared turn the lights on yet? 👇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.
