How I Make Strategy, Organisation, and Execution Work in Practice

Where I Actually Start

Most consultants get hired to help write a strategy. I rarely am. By the time I’m in the room, the strategy already exists — there’s a deck, a vision statement, sometimes a whole transformation roadmap with a name and a launch date.

What’s usually missing isn’t direction. It’s the connection between that direction and the people who have to act on it daily.

So I don’t start with strategy. I start by asking who owns what — and I usually get a vague answer. That vagueness is the actual starting point of every engagement I take on, whether the brief says “digital transformation,” “AI strategy,” or “MarTech roadmap.”

The brief always changes. The first question I ask never does: Who owns this, specifically?

How I Approach Digital Transformation

Digital transformation projects fail less often because of bad technology choices and more often because nobody owns the transformation itself — only its individual pieces.

When I look at a transformation initiative, I’m not assessing the platform or the roadmap first. I’m mapping who’s accountable for the outcome versus who’s accountable for the rollout. Those are almost always different people, and almost nobody has named that difference out loud.

My approach: I ask leadership to name one person who owns the business outcome of the transformation — not the IT project, the outcome. If they can’t name that person in the first conversation, that’s the actual problem we start solving, before touching a single tool or system.

How I Approach AI Initiatives

AI initiatives are where I see the strategy-execution gap most clearly today. Everyone has a mandate to “do something with AI.” Almost nobody has decided what business problem it’s meant to solve, owned by whom, measured how.

I treat AI projects exactly like any other execution problem — because that’s what they are. The technology is rarely the constraint. The constraint is that AI initiatives get spun up in isolation, owned by whichever team got curious first, with no connection to the actual strategic priorities of the business.

My approach: before discussing a single model or tool, I ask what AI is supposed to replace, improve, or remove — and who is accountable for that result. If an AI initiative can’t answer that, it’s a pilot, not a strategy, and I say so directly.

How I Approach MarTech

MarTech is my home turf, and it’s also where I see the strategy-organisation-execution gap most often dismissed as a tooling problem.

Companies buy platforms expecting the platform to create alignment. It never does. A CDP, a CMS, an automation suite — none of them create ownership. They just make the lack of ownership more visible, faster, and more expensive.

My approach: I never start a MarTech conversation with the stack. I start with who in the organisation is accountable for the customer journey the stack is meant to support. If that person doesn’t exist yet, building or buying more technology just adds complexity to a problem that was never technical.

How I Approach Collaboration Between Marketing, IT, and Leadership

I don’t try to get these three groups to like each other more or communicate more often. That’s not the actual gap.

The gap is that each group is optimising for a different definition of success, and nobody above them has reconciled those definitions. Marketing is measured on campaigns. IT is measured on uptime and delivery. Leadership is measured on the board deck. All three can hit their numbers while the company makes no progress at all.

My approach: I look for where these three groups hand work to each other — brief to backlog, backlog to build, build to launch — and I find out who owns each handoff. Usually, no one does. That’s where I focus first, not on relationship-building exercises.

How I Approach Governance and Ownership

Governance gets a bad reputation because most people experience it as bureaucracy — extra approval steps, extra meetings, slower decisions.

I approach it the opposite way. Good governance makes decisions faster, not slower, because it removes the ambiguity about who’s allowed to decide without checking first.

My approach: I map decision rights before I map process. Not “what’s the approval workflow,” but “who can say yes without asking anyone else, and for what.” When that’s unclear, every decision defaults to the most senior person in the room — which is slow, and which quietly trains the organisation to stop deciding things at all.

How I Approach Prioritisation

This is where I’m probably most direct with clients, and where I get the most resistance.

Most prioritisation conversations are additive — what should we add to the list. I run them as subtractive conversations — what comes off the list to make room for this.

My approach: I ask leadership to name what they’ll deliberately stop doing before we talk about what’s new. If nothing comes off the list, the new priority isn’t actually a priority — it’s a hope that the team will simply work harder. I’ve never seen that work for more than a quarter.

I’d rather a client tell me “we’re not ready to drop anything” than pretend a tenth priority is realistic. At least the first one is honest.

Why I Work in This Order

Digital transformation, AI, MarTech, collaboration, governance, prioritisation — these get treated as six different specialities, often with six different consultants or vendors involved. I don’t approach them that way, because in practice they’re the same underlying problem, wearing six different costumes.

Every one of them gets framed as a strategy challenge. Every one of them is actually an ownership challenge wearing a strategy costume. So my entry point is always the same, regardless of what’s written on the project brief: find where ownership is missing or ambiguous, and fix that before anything else.

That’s not a model I read in a book. It’s the order that’s worked, repeatedly, across very different projects and very different industries — because the underlying organisational problem barely changes, even when the technology does.

Where to Go From Here

If you’ve read this series and recognised your own organisation somewhere in it, the next step isn’t another strategy workshop. It’s a conversation about where ownership is genuinely unclear — and I’d start that conversation the same way I start every engagement: by asking who’s accountable, specifically, before discussing what’s next.

A Closing Thought

If any part of this series made you think of your own organisation, that reaction is worth paying attention to. Most leaders already know where their own seams are — they just haven’t had a reason to name them out loud yet. Sometimes that’s the only thing standing between a good strategy and a strategy that actually happens.

Article series: Strategy Isn’t the Problem. Execution Is.

• How Successful Digital Transformation Depends on Execution
• How Organisations Can Turn AI Initiatives into Real Business Value
• How MarTech Creates Business Value When Strategy and Execution Align
• How Better Collaboration Between Marketing, IT, and Leadership Improves Execution
• Why Governance and Clear Ownership Create Stronger Organisations
• How Strategic Prioritisation Creates Better Business Results
• How I Would Make Strategy, Organisation, and Execution Work in Practice