You Redesigned Your Strategy. Now Comes the Hard Part.

Let's say you did everything right.

You stress-tested your strategy. You exposed the assumptions. You mapped the dependencies, challenged the governance, found the failures, and rebuilt. The weak positions were removed. The controls were installed. The exposure was quantified, documented, and presented to the board with evidence, not opinions.

You now hold a strategy that has survived adversarial scrutiny. A strategy that can be defended under audit, under regulatory pressure, under competitive attack. A strategy with teeth.

Congratulations. You have solved twenty percent of the problem.

Because a strategy that survives scrutiny and a strategy that survives execution are two entirely different things. The first requires intellectual honesty. The second requires something far harder to engineer: sustained organizational alignment under conditions of uncertainty, speed, and competing priorities.

This is where most redesigned strategies go to die. Not because the strategy was wrong. Because the organization could not hold it together long enough to make it real.

A strategy lives or dies on the wall. Not in the slide deck.

The Execution Gap Is Not a Management Problem

There is a persistent belief in organizations that execution is a management discipline. You have a strategy. You decompose it into initiatives. You assign owners, set milestones, allocate budgets, and review progress quarterly. If something falls behind, you escalate. If something fails, you learn.

This belief is not wrong. It is incomplete in a way that becomes fatal when the strategy involves AI, digital transformation, or any initiative where the underlying conditions change faster than the review cycle.

The research is more nuanced than most execution frameworks suggest. A multi-year study across more than 250 companies found that most organisations already have strategic alignment in the traditional sense: clear goals, adequate resources, measurable targets. What they lack is coordination across units and the ability to adapt when conditions shift. Eighty-four percent of managers can rely on their direct reports. Only nine percent can rely on colleagues in other functions. The strategy is understood. The organization simply cannot hold it together across boundaries, especially when the environment moves faster than the plan.

And alignment is precisely what breaks first under pressure.

It breaks because the strategy gets translated differently at every level. The board sees a direction. The executive team sees priorities. Middle management sees projects. Teams see tasks. By the time the strategy reaches the people who actually do the work, it has been filtered, simplified, politicised, and reinterpreted so many times that what gets executed bears only a passing resemblance to what was decided.

This is not a failure of communication. It is a structural problem. Organisations are not designed for alignment. They are designed for specialisation, delegation, and reporting. And reporting, by its nature, aggregates away the very signals that alignment depends on.

Why AI Makes This Worse

Every challenge that has historically undermined strategic execution becomes harder when AI is involved. Not marginally harder. Categorically harder.

The decision cycle compresses. AI-augmented processes move faster than human governance can track. A strategy that assumed quarterly review cycles finds itself overtaken by systems that iterate daily.

Dependencies multiply. An AI-enabled strategy does not just depend on people, processes, and technology. It depends on models, data pipelines, vendor APIs, regulatory interpretations, and an increasingly complex web of automated interactions between systems that no single person fully understands.

Priorities shift continuously. As AI capabilities evolve — and they evolve within months, not years — what was a strategic priority last quarter may be obsolete this quarter. The portfolio needs constant rebalancing. But portfolio rebalancing requires context, judgement, and conversation. It requires people who understand both the strategic intent and the operational reality to be in the same room, looking at the same information, at the same time.

And here is the part that almost never makes it into the strategy deck: the human dimension does not scale automatically with the technology. You can deploy AI across forty processes in six months. You cannot build the organizational understanding, trust, and collaborative capacity to govern those deployments in the same timeframe. The technology scales. The people need time.

This creates a gap that widens silently. The strategy is clear. The execution is underway. The dashboards show progress. But underneath, the organization is fragmenting. Teams are working on different interpretations of the same priority. Dependencies are managed in silos. Problems are known locally but invisible globally. And nobody has a place where the full picture is visible, honest, and current.

The Portfolio Problem

Once a redesigned strategy lands, it immediately creates a portfolio problem. The strategy identifies what must change. The organization must now determine how much change it can absorb, in what sequence, with what resources, and at what risk.

This requires business cases. Not the performative kind that justify a predetermined conclusion, but genuine assessments of cost, benefit, risk, and dependency for each initiative. It requires prioritization, not based on who shouts loudest or who has the most senior sponsor, but based on strategic value, execution readiness, and the organisation's actual capacity to deliver.

It requires planning that acknowledges uncertainty rather than pretending it away. Traditional project plans assume stable conditions. AI-era execution faces conditions that shift with every model update, every regulatory development, every vendor decision. Planning must become adaptive, iterative, and honest about what is known and what is not.

And it requires control. Not control in the bureaucratic sense like approvals, sign-offs, status reports that nobody reads. Control in the engineering sense: the ability to detect deviation from intent, diagnose the cause, and correct course before the deviation compounds.

Most organisations attempt to solve this with tools. Project management software. Portfolio dashboards. OKR platforms. Risk registers. Each tool captures one dimension. None of them capture the thing that matters most: whether the people responsible for execution share the same understanding of what they are doing and why.

What Actually Holds Execution Together

The question is deceptively simple. Where in your organization does the complete picture live? Not the aggregated picture. Not the dashboard picture. Not the picture that has been filtered through three layers of reporting until it looks presentable.

The complete picture. Strategy and execution in one view. Priorities and capacity visible together. Problems surfaced, not managed away. Dependencies tracked, not assumed. Progress measured against intent, not against plan.

In most organizations, this place does not exist. The strategy lives in a document. The portfolio lives in a tool. The priorities live in someone's head. The problems live in corridor conversations. And alignment is maintained, when it is maintained at all, through an exhausting cycle of meetings, escalations, and negotiations that consume more energy than the work itself.

What follows is not a prescription. It is an illustration of the kind of execution environment that a redesigned strategy requires if it is to survive contact with reality. How an organization builds that environment is a leadership choice. But the conditions it must meet are not optional.

One well-established expression of this principle is the Obeya.

The Most Human Instrument

The Obeya — Japanese for "big room" — originated at Toyota during the development of the first Prius. The challenge was not technical. Toyota had the engineering capability. The challenge was coordination. Multiple disciplines, competing constraints, extreme time pressure, and a product that had never been built before. The traditional approach, decompose the problem, assign it to departments, integrate at the end, would have been too slow and too fragile.

The solution was radical in its simplicity. Put everyone in the same room. Put the work on the wall. Make the plan, the progress, the problems, and the dependencies visible to everyone, all the time. Not in a system. Not in a report. On the wall.

This was not a collaboration technique. It was a decision-making architecture. The Obeya made it possible for leaders to see the full picture, identify conflicts early, make trade-offs together, and maintain alignment without the overhead of formal coordination. The information was always current, always visible, and always honest because everyone in the room could see whether the wall matched reality.

The principle has since been adopted across manufacturing, product development, healthcare, and increasingly in IT and digital transformation. But the core insight remains unchanged. Alignment is not a communication problem that can be solved with better reporting. Alignment is a visibility problem that can only be solved by putting the truth in a shared physical space where it cannot be hidden, filtered, or politicised.

Why This Matters More in the AI Era

There is an irony in the current moment that deserves to be stated plainly.

We are investing billions in artificial intelligence: systems that analyse, predict, optimise, and automate at a speed and scale that no human can match. And the more we deploy these systems, the more desperately we need a space where humans can do the things that AI cannot: make meaning, exercise judgement, navigate ambiguity, build trust, and hold each other accountable for decisions that affect people's lives.

AI can score a risk. It cannot decide what level of risk the organisation is willing to accept. AI can surface a dependency. It cannot negotiate the political trade-off required to exit that dependency. AI can generate a hundred scenarios. It cannot sit in a room with three executives and help them agree on which scenario to plan for and which to accept.

The Obeya is where AI output becomes organisational intelligence. Where the diagnostic findings, the portfolio priorities, the execution risks, and the human dynamics are made visible together, in context, for the people who must act on them. Not as data. As understanding.

Consider what happens after a Strategic Exposure Scan delivers its findings. The board now knows where the strategy is exposed. The Governance Envelope has been assessed. The pressure points are documented. The recommendations are specific.

Now what?

Someone must translate those findings into a portfolio of initiatives. Someone must prioritize them against the organization's existing commitments. Someone must build business cases, assign ownership, secure resources, and track progress. Someone must manage the dependencies between initiatives that interact with each other in ways that no project plan can fully capture. And someone must maintain alignment across all of this while the underlying conditions continue to shift.

That "someone" is not a tool. It is not a dashboard. It is not a weekly status meeting where everyone reads their update and nobody says what they actually think.

It is a room. A wall. A discipline. A commitment to making the truth visible and acting on it together.

From Diagnosis to Discipline

Strategic Red Teaming does not solve execution. It makes execution honest. It tells you what is true about your strategy, where the exposure lives, and what must change. What organizations do with that honesty remains a leadership choice.

But the conditions for acting on that honesty are not mysterious. They require visibility. They require alignment. They require a shared space where strategy and reality meet daily, not quarterly. They require the organizational discipline to confront what the diagnosis revealed rather than filing it away.

The Obeya is one proven way to build that discipline. It is not the only way. But it is the one with the deepest evidence base, the longest track record, and the most demanding standard of honesty. It works not because it is clever, but because it makes the truth impossible to avoid.

Your strategy has been redesigned. The assumptions have been tested. The failures have been found and corrected.

Now comes the hard part.

The question is not whether you have the right strategy.

The question is whether your organization has a place where that strategy can survive contact with reality. Every day, not just once a quarter.

Sources

• Sull, D., Homkes, R. & Sull, C. (2015). Why Strategy Execution Unravels — and What to Do About It. Harvard Business Review.

• Liker, J. (2004). The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer. McGraw-Hill.

• Morgan, J. & Liker, J. (2006). The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process, and Technology. Productivity Press.

• Janssen, J. (2019). Iedereen Obeya: Strategisch verbonden en voorspelbaar verbeteren. Apparens.