🔨 The Stamp That Broke Four Things That Were Working ⚙️- One Size Fits All Delivery Model
There's a very specific kind of chaos that only a laminated slide deck can unleash.
Four teams, four completely different rhythms, four things that were genuinely, actually working. Sprint boards full of movement. A Gantt chart humming along fine. A product roadmap with real momentum behind it. A BAU team quietly, unglamorously keeping the lights on. All good. All functioning. And then someone walks in holding a giant rubber stamp that says "Standard Delivery Model" and just starts pressing it down on every team in sequence, methodically, one at a time, like they're stamping passports at a border crossing nobody applied to cross. Nobody checked if it fit. It just landed, four times, whether it belonged there or not.
This is one of the more counterintuitive failure modes in Strategy Execution. Standardization feels like progress. One process, one set of terms, one dashboard, easier to govern, easier to report on. But delivery teams need the autonomy to select the planning and execution model that actually suits them, agile, waterfall, product roadmaps, functional and BAU ownership, because that autonomy is often exactly what was making delivery work in the first place. Stamp a single enforced methodology on top of four different rhythms, and you don't get consistency. You get four teams that used to function, now equally confused, staring at a template that fits none of them.
That's exactly the trap Principle 2 of the 10 Key Principles of Strategy Execution, Establish an Enterprise Function to Orchestrate Strategy Execution, warns against. The goal was never uniformity of method, it's a direct line of sight across all execution regardless of the delivery model in use. The Strategy Execution Office's job is to establish enterprise standards and guidelines that connect these models, not collapse them into one and call it alignment.
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 a one size fits all delivery model shown up at your organization and broken something that was actually working fine?👇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.
