Why strategy and operations still pretend they are separate

Most organisations do not struggle to define strategy. They struggle to live with it.

Strategy is usually clear enough. The intent is articulated, endorsed and reported. There is a plan, a timeline and a named executive accountable for delivery. The board paper confirms it. The dashboard reflects it. The organisational chart reassures everyone that strategy is, indeed, happening.

And yet, outcomes drift.

This is not because leaders do not care about strategy. It is because strategy and operations still behave as though they occupy different worlds, politely connected but fundamentally separate.

 

How we ended up here

The separation between strategy and operations did not emerge because it works well. It emerged because it feels tidy.

Over time, strategy became an executive and board level activity. It lives in planning cycles, offsites and documents. Operations became the domain of delivery, managing risk, maintaining stability and keeping things moving.

Different rhythms developed. Different incentives. Different language.

Strategy optimises for direction and coherence.Operations optimise for continuity, efficiency and control.

Both are rational. Together, unless deliberately aligned, they quietly undermine each other.

 

The illusion of implementation

This is where things start to get interesting.

Many organisations will confidently state they are implementing strategy. The dashboard says so. The milestones are green. The reporting cadence is established. There may even be a role with the word strategy in the title, which is always comforting.

Ask the team, though, and you will often hear something else.

They assume strategy is someone else’s job. Usually upstairs. Or at head office. Or with a committee they have never met. The front line often does not know there is a strategy, let alone how their daily decisions connect to it. They are focused on what needs to work today.

Meanwhile, the board receives what it is given. Not because it is disengaged, but because governance relies on mediated truth. Boards see summaries, dashboards and papers, not the everyday trade-offs where strategy is actually being interpreted and reshaped.

From a distance, everything appears aligned.Up close, everyone is busy doing the sensible thing in their own part of the system.

 

Strategy by job title

Organisational structures reinforce this illusion.

If someone is responsible for strategy, then strategy must be happening. If it appears on the organisation chart, it must be under control. If it is reported quarterly, it must be progressing.

But strategy does not live in a job title.

It lives in decisions, especially the ones no one escalates because they feel too small to mention.

This is how organisations can be genuinely committed to strategy and still drift away from it. Not through neglect, but through perfectly rational behaviour operating inside systems that have not been designed to hold intent together.

 

Who actually drives strategy

On paper, executives drive strategy. Boards hold them accountable. There is always a name attached.

In practice, strategy tends to be shaped by whoever has the time to deal with it.

Executives are responsible for strategy. They approve it, defend it and present it with conviction. They are also managing risk, responding to stakeholders, navigating governance demands and keeping the organisation upright.

Strategy lives in the gaps between those pressures.

Operations do not have gaps. Decisions have to be made. Work has to move. Customers still call. Systems still fail. So, strategy begins to evolve quietly through operational choices, which initiatives get delayed, which risks are avoided, which shortcuts become standard.

By the time strategy is formally reviewed, it has often already changed. Not because anyone set out to change it. Because execution demanded it.

 

This shows up everywhere

What makes this dynamic particularly stubborn is that it appears across every context.

In government engine rooms, strategy is carefully articulated, endorsed and reported. Yet the machinery of approvals, risk frameworks and political timeframes reshapes it long before outcomes are realised.

In global organisations, strategy is sophisticated, data rich and well resourced. But layers of governance, competing markets and internal incentives fragment execution as it travels. By the time it reaches the front line, the intent is intact but diluted.

Mid-sized organisations are often the most surprised. They have survived the early years. They have broken through the well-known 7-year curse. And just as complexity increases, strategy starts slipping again, not because ambition fades, but because systems have not caught up with scale.

Small businesses do not romanticise the problem at all. They simply do not have time for it. Strategy exists in the gaps between delivery, payroll and keeping the doors open. Decisions are pragmatic, immediate and rarely labelled as strategic, even though they shape the business every day.

Different environments. Same pattern.

Strategy is always someone’s responsibility.

Execution is always everyone’s reality.

 

The evidence (because this is not just opinion)

Research consistently shows that a significant proportion of organisations struggle to execute strategy effectively, even when the strategic intent itself is sound. Across sectors and jurisdictions, implementation, not planning, remains the primary point of breakdown.

The implication is uncomfortable but clear. Strategy fails less often because it is wrong, and more often because organisations are not designed to sustain the decisions it requires.

 

Where strategy really lives

Implementation is not a phase that follows strategy. It is the period where strategy becomes uncomfortable.

This is where assumptions are tested.

Trade-offs surface.

Capability gaps emerge.

Governance frameworks start pulling behaviour in directions no one explicitly intended. This is also where strategy should be allowed to bend.

Not because it was flawed, but because execution reveals what matters, what is viable and what needs to change. Strategy that cannot adapt under pressure is not strategic, it is aspirational.

What actually works (and it is not complicated)

The irony is that most of the solutions to this problem are not complex at all.

They are simple. Almost disappointingly so.

Think of an organisation less like a machine and more like a choir.

There is a score. That is the strategy.

There is a conductor. That is leadership.

And there are a lot of people trying their best to stay in time.

Not everyone sings perfectly. Some people are up the back. Some are tone deaf. But if everyone can hear the melody and roughly follow the same tempo, the song still works.

Leaders make strategy happen by doing unglamorous things well:

•        making the strategy audible in everyday conversations

•        reducing competing priorities so the melody is clear

•        aligning decisions, not just messages

•        keeping the tempo steady instead of constantly changing the tune

•        accepting imperfect participation while maintaining coherence

Don’t misunderstand me, simple does not mean easy.

But it does mean possible.

 

And one last thing worth saying

Strategy is not mysterious.

It is often presented that way, but at its core, strategy is simply the point at which decisions begin to carry real weight. Most people who find themselves in leadership roles did not arrive there because they unlocked a secret body of knowledge. They arrived there because, over time, their judgement started to matter.

That is the real shift. Not intelligence. Not the perfect framework. It's responsibility.

There is a line often attributed to Orson Welles, while wrestling for years with his famously unfinished film adaptation of Don Quixote. He once remarked that making a film could be done in a matter of days if you understood the basics, but if everyone truly believed that, he joked, he would actually just be a fruit picker in Spain instead.

And yes, apologies to the Alphas and Millennials for the reference to an old movie star. Do look him up. Fascinating, larger than life, brilliant, stubborn, and a very big man in every sense.

The point was not that filmmaking is easy. It was that complexity is sometimes exaggerated to protect mystique.

Strategy often suffers the same fate.

It is not difficult because it is unknowable. It is difficult because it requires prioritisation, trade-offs and the willingness to decide in public, and then to stay with those decisions long enough for them to take effect.

Strategy does not need more mystery. It needs more courage, simplicity and follow through.

And in complex organisations, choosing clarity over cleverness is often the most strategic act of all.