A strategy becomes real through the decisions an organisation is prepared to repeat.
The annual strategy process can create a powerful moment of clarity. Leaders step away from immediate demands, examine the environment, make choices and agree where the organisation should concentrate. A plan is refined. The priorities are communicated. For a time, the organisation feels aligned.
Then ordinary work resumes.
Customer issues demand attention. Budgets remain attached to historical commitments. Functions interpret enterprise priorities through their own accountabilities. New information emerges, but the strategy is not formally revisited. By the next planning cycle, the gap between the original choices and organisational reality can be substantial.
This is not primarily a communication failure. It is a rhythm failure.
Strategy needs a management system that repeatedly connects direction with operating choices. Kaplan and Norton described the importance of linking strategy and operations through a closed-loop management system.[1] More recent work on strategy implementation reaches a similar conclusion: delivery depends on interacting managerial actions and organisational conditions rather than a single linear hand-off.[2]
The practical implication is straightforward. If the organisation reviews operational performance weekly but examines strategic assumptions annually, the calendar will eventually defeat the strategy.
Cadence directs attention
An operating rhythm is the set of recurring conversations through which leaders make decisions, allocate resources, remove constraints and learn. It includes meetings, but it is not a meeting schedule. Its value lies in the work each forum is designed to accomplish.
In many organisations, the rhythm has evolved rather than been designed. Monthly meetings inherit agendas from earlier leaders. Functional updates consume enterprise time. Strategic issues appear at the end, when attention is lowest. The same question is discussed in several forums because no one is certain where it should be decided.
The consequence is a form of organisational drift. People are busy and governance is active, but the strategic choices receive neither the concentration nor the decision quality they require.
Sull, Homkes and Sull found that execution difficulties often arise not from simple top-down misalignment, but from weak coordination across functions and an inability to adapt as circumstances change.[3] A strong rhythm must therefore do more than monitor whether teams followed the plan. It must enable leaders to manage interdependence and respond intelligently when reality challenges the plan.
Five disciplines of a strategy operating rhythm
1. Separate operating control from strategic movement
Operational performance deserves disciplined attention. So do cash, customers, risk and delivery. But when every issue shares one crowded agenda, urgent variance overwhelms strategic progress.
Distinct forums create distinct forms of attention. An operating review asks whether the business is performing and what intervention is required now. A strategy review asks whether priority outcomes are moving, whether critical assumptions remain valid and what enterprise trade-offs must be made. The two conversations inform one another, but they are not interchangeable.
2. Review outcomes and assumptions, not activity alone
Programme reporting naturally gravitates toward milestones, completion percentages and traffic lights. These indicators can be useful, but they can also give a false sense of control. A programme may be delivering its workplan while failing to produce the customer, commercial or organisational outcome that justified it.
Leaders should ask two kinds of question: Are we creating the intended value? What are we learning about the assumptions behind our choice? This shifts the conversation from compliance to performance and adaptation.
3. Put cross-enterprise decisions in the room
The strategic issues that matter most rarely sit neatly within one function. Growth may require choices across product, sales, operations, technology and talent. Transformation may expose competing demands for scarce capability. If each executive optimises within their own domain, the organisation can execute every functional plan and still miss the enterprise outcome.
The operating rhythm should identify decisions that only the executive team can make: reallocating resources, resolving interdependence, changing sequencing, addressing leadership constraints and stopping work that no longer merits investment.
4. Make follow-through visible
Repeated discussion without closure weakens confidence. Every consequential decision should have a clear owner, an explicit next step and a defined point of return. That does not mean bureaucratic minutes. It means preserving organisational memory so choices are not quietly reopened through private conversations or forgotten when attention moves.
The rhythm becomes credible when people see that decisions change priorities, resources and behaviour.
5. Create permission to adapt
Adaptation is not the same as abandoning discipline. A strategy based on assumptions must be capable of learning. The challenge is to distinguish weak persistence from intelligent adjustment.
Leaders can make this distinction by agreeing in advance what evidence would cause them to accelerate, amend or stop an initiative. This reduces the politics of change. A revised choice becomes a response to evidence rather than an admission that the original strategy was careless.
The CEO’s calendar is part of the operating model
Senior attention is one of the organisation’s scarcest resources. People notice where the CEO and executive team spend it. If leaders describe a priority as strategic but rarely return to it, the organisation will infer that immediate delivery still matters more.
In my own executive roles, the strongest rhythms were not necessarily the busiest. They were selective. They protected time for the few choices that could change enterprise performance, required functional leaders to arrive prepared to decide and made unresolved tensions discussable before they migrated into the organisation.
The aim was not to create more governance. It was to connect governance with movement.
Design the rhythm backwards from the strategy
A useful redesign begins with the work, not the meetings.
What are the five to seven outcomes that would show the strategy is advancing? Which assumptions need continuing examination? What decisions will cut across executive accountabilities? Where must resources be capable of moving? At what interval could the evidence reasonably change?
Only then should leaders decide what forums, information and participants are required.
The resulting rhythm may include a short monthly strategy progress review, a deeper quarterly strategy and resource conversation, and an annual refresh. The precise cadence matters less than the integrity of the connections. Information should lead to judgement; judgement to decision; decision to action; action to learning.
Strategy is not sustained by the strength of its launch. It is sustained by the quality of the organisation’s return to it.
Questions for a leadership team
- Which strategic choices receive protected attention in our current calendar?
- Where are we tracking activity without testing value?
- Which cross-functional decisions are repeatedly delayed or escalated?
- What evidence would cause us to adapt a priority?
- Does our operating rhythm make strategy easier to deliver—or easier to report?
Sources and further reading
- Kaplan, R. S. & Norton, D. P. (2008), “Mastering the Management System,” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2008/01/mastering-the-management-system
- Tawse, A. & Tabesh, P. (2021), “Strategy implementation: A review and an introductory framework,” European Management Journal, 39(1), 22–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2020.09.005
- Sull, D., Homkes, R. & Sull, C. (2015), “Why Strategy Execution Unravels—and What to Do About It,” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-strategy-execution-unravelsand-what-to-do-about-it
- McKinsey & Company (2025), “A new operating model for a new world.” https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/a-new-operating-model-for-a-new-world
- Harvard Business School (2008), “Strategy Execution and the Balanced Scorecard.” https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/strategy-execution-and-the-balanced-scorecard