Case Study: From Silos to Shared Action

What happens when an executive team is expected to execute a strategy it played no part in developing? Usually, very little.

That was the situation facing one CEO who invited me into his organisation. He did not simply want another strategy document. He wanted a process that would help his executives understand the whole business, confront difficult choices and take collective ownership of what happened next.

The problem: a strategy imposed from above

The CEO was candid from the outset: his executive team had never really worked together on strategy.

Under his predecessor, strategy had been developed privately by the CEO and the head of strategy. Once complete, it was presented to the other executives as a finished product.

The team had learnt that suggestions and criticism were unwelcome. Challenging the strategy achieved little beyond getting the challenge shut down.

Unsurprisingly, understanding was poor. Buy-in was even worse. The strategy struggled to translate into execution, and the organisation was underperforming.

The new CEO challenged me to design a better process.

The answer was not simply to invite more people to a workshop. Before the team could make sound strategic choices together, we had to rebuild its shared understanding of the business and make constructive disagreement possible again.

Step 1: creating a shared evidence base

It quickly became clear that each executive understood their own function, but had a much weaker grasp of the organisation as a whole.

They had operated in silos for years. Information from elsewhere in the business might have been circulated, but there had been little incentive to engage with it. If executives were not expected to contribute to enterprise-wide decisions, sticking to their own lanes was a rational response.

Our first task was therefore to produce a focused data pack.

The aim was not to overwhelm the executives with every piece of information the organisation possessed. It was to give them a common view of its performance, capabilities, customers and operating environment.

This established a shared starting point for the work ahead.

How StratNav supported this stage

The relevant evidence and observations could be captured in StratNav as structured strategic insights rather than left scattered across presentations, spreadsheets and meeting notes.

That created a cumulative evidence base which could be analysed, discussed and carried forward into later decisions. It also provided traceability: the team could see the evidence and reasoning behind the choices it would eventually make.

Step 2: giving every executive a voice

I then conducted one-to-one interviews with each executive.

These conversations explored not only their own areas of responsibility, but also what they had learnt about the wider organisation from the data pack. Speaking individually gave each person room to express concerns, challenge assumptions and raise issues they might not yet have felt comfortable discussing in front of the group.

I fed the interviews into StratNav and used its AI-supported analysis to distil common insights, identify differences of opinion and surface issues requiring further investigation.

AI did not make the strategic judgements. Its value was in helping me process a substantial body of qualitative information, spot recurring themes and identify sensible next steps. This left more time for the work that required human judgement: testing the findings, framing the real choices and facilitating the executive conversation.

StratNav’s AI summaries also helped turn lengthy interview material into structured insights that could become part of the organisation’s live strategy record.

Step 3: turning insights into real strategic choices

Using the evidence and interview findings, I developed a series of strategic choices and trade-offs.

Each choice included two or more credible alternatives. This mattered.

If you ask a team to choose between an obviously good option and an obviously bad one, you have not created a strategic debate. You have created a test with an easy answer.

Real strategy requires choosing between alternatives that each have advantages, disadvantages and different implications for the organisation. Committing to one path usually means deciding not to pursue another.

Strategy Alternative Matrices provided a structured way to compare these options. The alternatives could be assessed against common criteria, making their assumptions, benefits, risks and consequences more explicit.

The matrices supported the discussion without pretending that strategy could be reduced to a mathematical answer. Their role was to improve the quality of executive judgement, not replace it.

Step 4: making disagreement productive

We scheduled two full-day strategy workshops to work through the choices.

For each trade-off, I:

1. Presented the alternatives.
2. Explained why they were mutually exclusive, or at least competed for the same resources and attention.
3. Asked each executive to vote.
4. Recorded the votes.
5. Invited people to explain the reasoning behind their decisions.

The initial votes were useful, but the real value came from the debate that followed.

Executives exposed different assumptions about customers, capabilities, risk and the organisation’s future. They heard how colleagues viewed parts of the business beyond their own functions. Disagreement became a source of information rather than something to suppress.

In most cases, the team eventually agreed on a preferred option. Sometimes, the discussion produced a better alternative than any I had originally proposed. In a few cases, we had to return to the drawing board.

That was one reason for holding two workshops rather than trying to force every decision into a single day. The gap between the sessions allowed me to investigate unresolved questions and develop further options.

StratNav provided a record of the alternatives, votes, reasoning and resulting decisions. Its Meeting Manager could also be used to capture discussion summaries, decisions and follow-up actions, connecting what happened in the room to the strategy being developed.

Step 5: turning choices into a credible story

Once the major choices had been made, I synthesised them into a strategic narrative for the organisation.

The story included:

• A vision for the organisation’s future.
• An explanation of how different parts of the organisation would need to operate.
• The changes required to move from the current state to the intended future.
• The logic connecting those changes to the choices the executives had made.

I played the narrative back to the team and asked them to refine it until they considered it plausible.

Plausibility had to be tested in both directions:

• Was the strategy sufficiently ambitious?
• Could the organisation realistically achieve it?

The time horizon became an important part of this discussion. The team concluded that five years provided enough time to make the required changes while still setting an outcome they regarded as genuinely ambitious.

A shorter period would probably have required a more modest ambition. A longer one might have supported a more radical transformation, but at the cost of greater uncertainty.

Step 6: confronting organisational reality

Testing the narrative forced the executive team to examine the organisation’s real capabilities.

Did it have the necessary people and skills? Were its processes and systems fit for purpose? Would the existing culture support the changes being proposed?

Several hard truths emerged.

This is an essential part of strategy development. A vision is not credible simply because it is attractive. The organisation must understand what has to change before that vision becomes achievable.

Capturing these findings in StratNav meant that capability gaps and cultural constraints did not disappear into workshop notes. They became part of the strategy and informed the goals and initiatives that followed.

Step 7: converting strategy into an executable plan

With the strategic narrative agreed, we turned it into plans.

We set long-term goals and broke them down into shorter-term objectives. We defined KPIs describing the results or changes the organisation would need to achieve.

We then created a programme of initiatives covering the work required to deliver those changes. The initiatives were prioritised and roughly sequenced across the five-year planning period.

For the near-term initiatives, we examined budgets, people and other resources in greater detail. Resource constraints forced another round of difficult choices. A strategy that assumes unlimited capacity is not a strategy the organisation can execute.

StratNav connected these elements within one system:

• The Strategy Scorecard linked goals, objectives and KPIs, giving the organisation a coherent view of strategic performance.
• Initiative records described the work required to deliver the strategy.
• Priorities, timings and dependencies helped translate ambition into a sequenced programme.
• The Initiative Status Report provided a consistent view of delivery progress, risks and emerging problems.

The strategy and plan were then presented to the board, which approved them.

Step 8: moving from approval to execution

Board approval was not the finish line.

The next stage was to mobilise the initiatives scheduled for year one. At the same time, the organisation had to determine how it would collect the data required for its new KPIs.

Some of the strategy’s most important outcomes concerned areas the organisation had not historically measured. Defining a KPI was therefore only the beginning. The team also needed to establish data sources, responsibilities, baselines and reporting processes.

Because the scorecard and initiatives were already mapped in StratNav, the organisation could move from formulation into execution without reconstructing the strategy in a collection of separate Office documents.

Step 9: establishing a management cadence

Finally, we established a monthly executive review.

Each meeting would use a prepared pack showing:

• Performance against goals, objectives and KPIs.
• Progress on year-one initiatives.
• Risks, delays and dependencies.
• Decisions and interventions required from the executive team.

StratNav’s Strategy Scorecard, Initiative Status Report and Meeting Manager supported this cadence. AI summaries could help condense updates and highlight material changes, while the underlying strategy remained available for executives who needed to explore the detail.

This turned strategy from an occasional planning exercise into a recurring management discipline.

From static documents to a living strategy

The most important outcome was not the production of a five-year plan. It was the creation of shared understanding, explicit choices and collective executive ownership.

The team moved from working in silos to debating enterprise-wide decisions. Strategy stopped being something presented to them and became something developed by them.

StratNav supported the entire journey:

• Capturing and organising the evidence.
• Analysing interviews and summarising insights.
• Comparing credible strategic alternatives.
• Recording choices and their rationale.
• Building the strategic narrative.
• Connecting goals, objectives, KPIs and initiatives.
• Monitoring performance and delivery.
• Supporting structured monthly reviews.

Instead of ending up with a presentation, a spreadsheet and a set of workshop notes that would quickly become outdated, the organisation had a live system connecting strategy development with execution.

That is what makes strategy actionable: not merely deciding where you want to go, but preserving the reasoning, choices, measures and work required to get there.

If your executive team needs to develop genuine strategic alignment, book a call to discuss your needs.

If you already have a strategy but struggle to keep execution connected to it, schedule a StratNav demonstration.

Or try StratNav and start building a living strategy your leadership team can understand, own and execute.