The Management Blindspot: The Next Evolution in Management Thinking, by Travis Soutter
- Ben Chamberlain
- Aug 7
- 4 min read
Coordination isn't something governance produces automatically. It's a capability organizations have never learned to see, measure or deliberately improve.
Principle 2 establishes the Strategy Execution Operating Model. But an operating model only works if the decisions flowing through it, everything from translating strategic direction in Principle 3 to realizing value in Principle 10, are actually being interpreted the same way by the people making them. This Member Insight, the third in Travis Soutter's series, argues that coordination is the layer underneath every one of those Principles, and it's been management's blind spot all along.
Every discipline from finance to risk to governance has made its own domain more visible and measurable. None of them was built to see how thousands of distributed decisions actually interpret strategic intent once it leaves the boardroom and moves through the rest of the operating system. Travis argues that's about to change, and shows what it looks like when it does.
This Member Insight (The Management Blindspot: The Next Evolution in Management Thinking) comes from Travis Soutter, founder of Concordia and a founding member of The Strategy eXecution Forum.
StrategyXF Member Insights: The Management Blindspot: The Next Evolution in Management Thinking
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The question the first two articles were building toward
Travis's first two articles for the community established, first, that execution drift is a natural consequence of complexity and simplification, and second, why it happens: cognition and emotion shape how every individual interprets strategic intent long before a decision is made. This third piece asks the harder question those two set up. If coordinated decision making is what actually determines whether strategy becomes reality, why has management spent a century building disciplines to govern everything except that?
Every management discipline simplifies. None of them coordinates.
Financial management simplifies economic performance into financial information. Risk management simplifies uncertainty into identifiable risks. Governance simplifies accountability into structures and oversight. Each of these has made organizations more capable, and each does its job well within its own domain. But organizational performance was never determined inside a single domain. It happens where those domains interact, where finance meets operations meets commercial priorities, and every one of those handoffs is a fresh act of interpretation. Executives reviewing governance data aren't seeing organizational reality. They're seeing a collection of disciplined, necessarily incomplete interpretations of it.
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Making the invisible visible
Travis's core proposal is that coordinated decision making can now be treated the way finance treats capital or risk management treats uncertainty: as something that can be understood, measured and deliberately improved. Every decision leaves evidence of the reasoning behind it. Examined individually, that evidence tells you little. Examined collectively across levels, functions and stakeholder groups, recurring decision tendencies emerge, and those tendencies can be mapped against an organization's actual strategic intent along two dimensions: direction and coordination. That mapping surfaces four distinct patterns, from genuine Strategic Alignment down to Organisational Disorder, and most organizations don't know which one they're actually in.
From the Insight: "Coordinated decision making has always determined how strategy translates to organisational outcomes."
What this looked like in practice
Travis applied this inside a large public sector organization that had already invested heavily in a recognized governance framework, stronger planning, and clearer structure. Governance reviews kept confirming the framework was on track. Execution kept not improving. When the assessment shifted from evaluating governance structures to evaluating the decision tendencies underneath them, it found low coordination across participating stakeholders, driven not by weak governance or incapable people, but by competing objectives and mixed signals that no governance review could have surfaced. The organization wasn't lacking discipline. It was lacking visibility into a layer it had never been built to see.
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Why StrategyXF is sharing this
StrategyXF exists to elevate Strategy Execution as a C-Suite imperative, and this closing piece in Travis's series gives the community language for something most organizations feel but can't yet name: that a well-governed operating model on paper can still be running on fragmented, uncoordinated interpretation underneath, at every stage from Principle 3 through Principle 10. Understanding coordinated decision making doesn't replace governance, strategy or risk management. It completes them, giving leaders visibility into the layer that has always determined whether strategic intent actually becomes organizational reality, all the way through execution.
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 look forward to hearing where the community sees this pattern showing up in their own organizations.
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.
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