Most organizations we work with don’t have a strategy problem. They know where they want to go. The challenge starts when the organization has to actually get there.
Priorities have changed, but decisions are still made in the same places. Teams are asked to collaborate more, while targets keep pulling them apart. People are expected to take ownership, but important decisions still travel upwards. The business wants to move faster, while the organization has become very good at preventing mistakes. None of these things are necessarily wrong. They probably made sense at some point. The problem is that the organization has changed direction and the way it works has not changed with it.
That is where we work.
Strategy eventually becomes an organizational question
A strategy can describe a different future, but it cannot simply declare the organization required to create it. People still have to make decisions, share information, allocate resources, solve disagreements and decide what gets priority when two important things compete. They do that within an organization that already has its own habits, incentives, structures and assumptions about how things get done.
We see culture as part of that system. Not something that sits next to strategy, but one of the things that determines what happens to strategy once hundreds or thousands of people start making everyday decisions about it.
That is why changing the message rarely changes enough. If people are still rewarded for the old priorities, if authority remains unclear or if collaboration makes someone’s own targets harder to achieve, the old behavior often remains perfectly sensible.
We describe this perspective in more detail in Culture as a System.
Finding where strategy and the organization contradict each other
The interesting part is usually not finding everything that could work better. There is always plenty. We are looking for the contradictions that matter to the strategy.
If the strategy requires faster decisions, where are decisions actually getting stuck? If growth requires more ownership from teams, what keeps pulling authority back upwards? If different parts of the business need to work as one, where does the organization still make it more attractive to optimize locally?
Sometimes the answer sits in formal structures such as decision rights, targets or incentives. Sometimes it is in the way information moves through the organization, what leaders do when pressure increases or assumptions that have become so normal that nobody thinks to question them.
Usually it is a combination. The aim is to understand which of these things are genuinely getting in the way of the next move the business wants to make. That gives us a much smaller and more useful problem to work on.
Changing enough, rather than everything
Once we know where the important contradictions are, we work with the organization to change the conditions behind them.
That might mean clarifying who can decide what, changing performance signals that unintentionally reward the wrong outcome, removing friction between teams or changing how information reaches the people who need to act on it. Leadership behavior matters too, particularly when what leaders do under pressure sends a different signal from what they say when things are going well.
This is not a communication program or a values exercise. It is also not an attempt to redesign the entire organization as most clients don’t need that
We want to change enough of the system for the behavior the strategy requires to become sensible. If you want people to take more ownership, for example, telling them to take ownership is the easy part. Making sure they have the authority, information and incentives to actually do it is where the work starts.
Different strategies create different organizational questions
We have encountered these questions in very different organizations and circumstances.
For example, at Fugro, the work started with a strategic change as part of the One Fugro project that needed to work across an organization spanning more than 65 countries. We used culture research to understand what was helping and getting in the way, then worked on the values and behaviors that needed to support the direction of the business.
At GetYourGuide, the question came from growth. Working with the Executive Board, we revisited the organizational values and the employee proposition together. The point was not to describe the culture the company already had, but to be more deliberate about what needed to remain and what needed to evolve as the organization scaled internationally.
The context matters because there is no standard culture model we are trying to install. A company trying to integrate previously separate parts of its business has a different organizational problem from one trying to preserve speed while scaling. A strategy built around efficiency asks different things from people than one built around innovation.
So we don’t start by asking what the culture should be. We start with what the business is trying to achieve and work backwards. What would people need to do differently for that to happen, and what currently makes that behavior difficult, unattractive or sometimes simply impossible?
That is where strategy becomes practical.
When this work is useful
Sometimes the problem really is the strategy. If leadership does not agree on the choices, another look at the organization will not solve that. This work becomes useful when the direction is reasonably clear but execution keeps producing the same friction. Decisions remain slow. The same issues keep escalating. Teams agree that they need to work differently but fall back into old patterns. Leaders find themselves intervening repeatedly to keep things moving.
At that point, another round of communication is unlikely to make much difference. It is worth looking at why the organization keeps producing the behavior it does. Our Culture Strategy Audit is one way to start if it is not yet clear where the friction sits. If you want to understand the thinking behind the strategy execution problem first, I have written about why good strategies fail in more detail.
If you already know that the organization itself is getting in the way of what the business is trying to achieve, that is the problem we work on.