.png)
If you run a strategy function, you've probably had this experience. You're in a leadership meeting and the agenda is packed with operational stuff: this quarter's numbers, the budget reforecast, a procurement issue that somehow needs the entire exec team's attention. Strategy is item seven. You get twelve minutes. Half the room is checking email.
You leave thinking: if I just had more authority, more budget, a direct line to the CEO, a seat at the investment table, this would work. The strategy would land. People would take it seriously.
Maybe. But probably not, because the strategy leaders who actually get traction tend not to be the ones with the biggest mandates. They're the ones who figured out where the real leverage is.
We ran a panel recently with Tom Wright (our founder and CPO) and James Butler (Head of Strategy & Strategic Delivery at Ausgrid), who's also led strategy and transformation at Qantas, Lendlease, and other major Australian organizations. We expected a conversation about org charts and reporting lines. What we got was a much more honest conversation about power, trust, and why the things most strategy leaders fight for aren't actually the things that matter.
Stop Trying to Own the Strategy
This might be the most counterintuitive thing Tom said all session: don't fight for ownership of the strategy content. That's the wrong battle.
The strategy itself is almost always inherited. The board signed off on something, or McKinsey left a deck, or the CEO has a vision they're not interested in revisiting. You can try to rewrite all of that in year one, but you'll burn through your political capital before you've built any credibility. And even if you win that fight, owning the what doesn't help you if nobody's executing it.
The better fight is for the how. Own the planning process, the governance cadence, the frameworks, the taxonomy, the workshops, the review structure. Decide how business units translate corporate goals into their own plans and how and when the leadership team talks about strategic progress.
That last one is where most strategy functions lose the plot. Ask any strategy leader how often their exec team has a dedicated conversation about strategic progress (not revenue, not cost, not this quarter's crisis, just: are the things we committed to 12 months ago actually moving?) and the honest answer is almost never. The annual offsite, maybe. A quarterly review that gets bumped or shortened, sometimes. Real, protected, recurring time where strategy is the only thing on the agenda? Rare.
If you can get that time, even just an hour a month, you've changed the game. Not because an hour solves anything, but because it forces the exec team to confront whether they're actually making progress or just talking about it.
And here's the part that doesn't get said enough. Tom made the point well:
"That's how I see the mandate evolving: building the process, building the systems, building the governance, building the reporting suite. That in turn gives you a lot of power as well. He who controls the process often controls the outcome of the process." - Tom Wright
You don't need to tell a business unit what their priorities should be. But if you're the one framing the questions in the workshop, structuring what gets reported, deciding what format the quarterly review takes, you're shaping the answer. That's not a consolation prize. That's real power, and most strategy leaders don't recognize it because it doesn't come with a title upgrade.
The Org Chart Matters Less Than You Think (With One Exception)
We polled the audience during the session. Only 7% said their strategy mandate was "very clear and well understood." Most people landed somewhere between "mostly clear" and "honestly, it's a bit vague." No surprises there.
Tom and James both agreed on the obvious bit: the closer to the CEO, the better. But James made a sharper point about what actually matters for the strategy function's credibility:
"One of the core minimum viable criteria for me is that the CEO and the executives view the strategy function as a key part of the business. They don't view it as a necessary evil. Not just 'we've got to put some slides together for the board.' They view it as a really valuable enabler of the executive team and of their success." - James Butler
Where strategy sits in the org shapes that perception. James was clear that placing it inside a business unit is almost always a mistake. If you've got a geographically aligned business and strategy sits in the Americas division, the European and Asian teams will view it as owned by a different part of the business. Once that perception takes hold, failure to launch becomes almost inevitable.
The CFO question is the one that generates the most debate. James has been through cycles where finance owned the strategy function and it worked just fine, and cycles where a finance-first CFO turned the entire corporate strategy into a cost-reduction exercise. Once that happens, you've lost something you can't easily get back. A strategy that boils down to "spend less" doesn't give anyone a reason to care.
As Tom put it, "Strategy needs to be a function that motivates people. It needs to be a reason why people join the business and a reason why people stay."
That's hard to deliver when the framing is purely financial.
You probably can't change your reporting line in year one, though, and spending energy trying to is energy you're not spending on the stuff you can control: the process, the governance, the cadence, the tools. Get those right and build credibility, and the org chart conversation becomes much easier to have from a position of strength later.
Why Your Strategy "Didn't Take" (and What to Do About It)
Tom shared something that should make every strategy leader uncomfortable. He'd recently spoken with two large companies, one a top-ten in New Zealand and one in Australia, that both launched new strategies in the past 18 months. Both spent serious money. Both had clear, well-articulated plans. Both reported the same outcome: "It didn't take."
He calls it organ rejection. The organization's immune system attacked the strategy because it didn't recognize it as its own.
Here's what went wrong in both cases. Leadership got excited about the new direction, pushed hard, and rolled it out fast. Big town halls, polished comms, the works. But the people three levels down, the ones who'd actually need to change what they do on a Tuesday morning, looked at the new plan and saw nothing that reflected their reality. They're spending 90% of their time just keeping the lights on, and the strategy didn't acknowledge that. So they smiled, nodded, and went back to what they were doing. A year later, leadership realized nothing had moved.
For a large listed company, that's tens of millions in misdirected or stalled investment. The uncomfortable truth is that the fix is boring. It's listening. And it's slow, which is why people skip it.
Tom described what the successful strategy leaders do differently:
"They proactively flip the narrative and say: we've got a strategy, but forget about that for a second. Let's start with you. What are you working on? What's working, what's not working? If you were the consultant, what would you be telling us to do? It doesn't mean you're going to implement all of the things that people say. But going hard into listening mode on day one is a really powerful thing. People don't expect 100% of their views to be carried out. But if you show that humility, that almost disarming nature, and you reflect their words in the formation of the strategy, you can flip the narrative pretty effectively." - Tom Wright
When people see their own language in the strategy, when it describes the world they actually live in instead of pretending everyone's got spare capacity for ten new initiatives, you get a completely different reaction. The plan stops feeling like something done to them and starts feeling like something they're part of.
The PMO Problem Nobody Will Say Out Loud
This was the part of the conversation where things got uncomfortable in a good way.
Tom told a story from a recent deal where he was scoping a Cascade implementation with the CEO and CFO of a large Australian healthcare provider. When he brought up the PMO (because you have to, delivery is half the strategy equation) both executives basically refused to engage. They didn't want to go there.
If you've worked in a large organization, you've probably seen a version of that reaction. PMOs have gotten very good at building their own world with their own tools, conferences, certification pathways, and internal language. None of that is inherently bad, but there's a test that most PMOs would struggle with right now: can you tie every active project back to the current corporate strategy? Not the transformation program from five years ago that most of the business considers finished. The current one. If the answer is no, the PMO has drifted, and leadership's response is increasingly to just work around it.
James offered a different way to think about what the delivery function should actually look like:
"I sort of think about it as a control tower. You are trying to bring all these different projects into land with a limited amount of resources. You're not actually controlling the projects, it's still a pilot leading it, but you're trying to get the maximum number of projects through a limited amount of space. The business leaders need to be actually flying the plane." - James Butler
At Ausgrid, he's built a small team that sits between strategy and delivery: people who can think strategically but also get their hands dirty on execution, unblocking the path from corporate plan to what business units actually need to do. It's not a traditional PMO. It's a bridging function, and he thinks it's where a lot of the real value lives regardless of what the org chart says.
Alignment Is a Direction, Not a Destination
If you've ever tried to force 100% top-down strategic alignment across a large organization, you already know how this goes. It looks great in the framework but in practice it makes everything brittle. People start doing strategy as theatre, filling in templates to satisfy the governance process without actually thinking about what matters for their part of the business.
James has seen what happens when multiple parts of the business try to drive strategy independently without that common thread:
"There can be a danger where you end up with multiple different strategy teams all trying to drive strategy across the business. You end up with a corporate strategy that's being driven one way, each business unit is driving strategy in a different way. That's the perfect recipe for a failure to launch, and the overall strategy to fall over." - James Butler
The answer isn't to clamp down with rigid top-down control, though. Tom was direct about that: absolute alignment doesn't work. It's brittle, it's rigid, and if you try to enforce it, it breaks. A well-run strategy team actually looks at what's coming bottom-up from business units and adapts the corporate strategy to incorporate good ideas that weren't in the original plan. That's not a failure of alignment. That's the system working.
We had an honest internal debate about this when we were building Cascade. The platform calculates an alignment score (0 to 100) for how closely a business unit's work connects to the corporate strategy, and the question was whether to put a red/amber/green on that number. We decided not to, because 30% alignment at a company that's never done this before might be a genuine win. The number that matters isn't the absolute score. It's whether it's going up.
James grounded this with how things work at Ausgrid. The corporate strategy says battery technology is a priority, but the business unit decides the commercial models, the partners, and the locations. What holds the two together isn't a rigid cascade from the top. It's a combination of formal executive alignment and informal stuff that's just as important: coffee catch-ups between strategy leads, short secondments, regular conversations that don't live on any governance calendar.
Tom's benchmark for large organizations is 5 to 10% annual improvement in strategic alignment. That sounds modest until you do the maths. As he put it: "That is billions of dollars for some companies. You can't be too greedy about getting everything right first time around." The strategy leader's job is to keep tightening that alignment over time without strangling the autonomy that makes business units effective. That's harder than writing a good strategy, but it's the actual work.
So What's Your Minimum Viable Mandate?
If you take one thing from this conversation, it's that the authority most strategy leaders wish they had isn't actually what makes the difference. The ones who get traction aren't waiting for a bigger title or a cleaner reporting line. They're owning the process, protecting time on the leadership calendar, earning trust through listening, and building alignment gradually rather than forcing it from the top.
None of that requires permission. It requires patience, and a willingness to play a longer game than most people are comfortable with.
James put it simply near the end of the session: "You need to be in the room. And to get into the room, you need to build the trust."
The mandate follows from there. It rarely arrives before.
___________________________________________
This article is based on a panel discussion hosted by Cascade with Tom Wright (Founder and CPO, Cascade) and James Butler (Head of Strategy & Strategic Delivery, Ausgrid), moderated by Paul Hawkins (Founder and Chief Combobulator, Crazy Might Work). You can watch the full recording here.
.png)
