Continuous strategy as an operating model

The challenge

In Services and Tech organisations, strategy has changed — but most strategy practices haven’t.

Many organisations still rely on frameworks and planning cycles designed in the 1960s–80s: pre-digital, pre-tech, pre-service economy, and largely pre-global. These approaches assume stable markets, linear value chains, and predictable execution.

Today, value is created across complex product–service mixes and digital ecosystems. Customer needs shift faster, disruptors emerge unexpectedly, and technology continuously reshapes competitive dynamics. Advantage now depends on how quickly organisations can learn, adapt, and refocus.

As a result, strategy often disconnects from reality:

• Teams focus on delivery and lose sight of business outcomes

• Initiatives multiply while organisational coherence erodes

• Strategy becomes rigid when it needs to flex, or vague when it needs focus

• Learning and constraints from execution fail to feed back into the strategic direction

The issue is not ambition or intelligence.

It is that strategy is still treated as a static plan, rather than a living system that guides performance.

Our point of view

In modern Services and Tech businesses, strategy must operate as a continuous system.

A strong strategy operating model enables local initiative while holding overall organisational coherence. It keeps strategic attention on outcomes rather than delivery activity, and it allows direction to flex as reality shifts without destabilising execution.

This requires a different leadership stance:

leaders move from periodic strategy formulation to ongoing strategic stewardship — setting intent, testing it through execution, learning from results, and adjusting deliberately.

Strategy becomes effective when:

• direction is explicit, visible, and shared

• teams understand how their work contributes to outcomes

• strategic choices can adapt as markets and technology evolve

This is not about more planning.

It is about keeping more organisational focus on what truly drives performance.

What we design and improve

We help organisations turn strategy into a continuous operating model, designed for Services and Tech contexts:

• Clear strategic intent connected to value creation and competitive advantage

• A small set of outcome-focused strategic priorities that guide real trade-offs

• Alignment mechanisms linking leadership direction to team-level initiatives

• Regular cadences of strategy mapping, review, and refresh to surface weak signals and adapt early

• Strategy visualisation (Obeya-style) that reconnects delivery to business outcomes

• Leadership practices that maintain coherence without centralised control

We also help leaders and teams build a sharper understanding of digital strategy patterns, so they can better spot opportunities, risks, and structural constraints in evolving markets.

Rather than separating strategy development from deployment, we deliberately bring them closer together.

The business outcomes

Organisations typically achieve:

• Clearer priorities and faster strategic decisions

• Stronger alignment between direction and execution

• Fewer initiatives with greater impact

• Greater agility without loss of coherence

• Leadership teams able to steer performance as conditions change

Strategy shifts from being a periodic event to a driver of sustained performance.

How to start

We begin with an initial analysis to baseline the strategy into an xMatrix — making explicit what is often implicit or fragmented. This surfaces how strategic intent, objectives, initiatives, measures, and ownership actually connect (or don’t) across the organisation.

In many cases, strategy exists as high-level statements with little linkage to execution. The xMatrix makes coherence and disconnects visible, creating a shared, factual view of where strategy is currently holding — and where it is leaking performance.

From there, we design a first strategy increment: a practical way to connect outcomes, initiatives, and review cadences in real conditions. This is typically initiated with the executive team, or through an off-site that brings a broader leadership group into the strategy.

Each increment is then put into practice, reviewed, and adjusted through continuous working groups and regular strategy refresh events — making the strategy adaptive to changing conditions and to its own progress, while progressively strengthening both the strategy operating model and the leadership capability required to hold it over time.