Capital Moves Faster Than Governance: Why Strategy Leaders Are Rewriting the Rules of Resource Allocation

There’s a strange tension sitting inside large organisations right now. A quiet one. But you can feel it if you listen closely enough.

It sounds like this:

“We’re making decisions at 2025 speed……but our governance still thinks it’s 2012.”

Over the last few weeks, we've spoken with strategy leaders across banks, telcos, mining, government, retail, and tech. Different industries, but the same pain point:

Capital is moving faster than the systems designed to allocate it.

Ideas are emerging faster. AI is revealing opportunities faster. Markets are shifting faster. But funding, approvals, portfolio reviews, and governance structures?

Still running on old wiring.

And that mismatch is becoming one of the biggest hidden blockers in strategy execution today.

1. Capital now moves at “signal speed,” not calendar speed

Ten years ago, planning cycles matched the pace of change. Annual budgets worked. Quarterly reviews worked. Stage-gates worked.

But something has changed:

• AI shortens discovery cycles from months to days

• Teams spin up solutions before governance even meets

• Customer expectations shift mid-quarter

• Competitors launch new products at “algorithmic pace,” not annual pace
  

The result?

Opportunities show up faster than leaders can approve them.

One CSO told us:

“Our best ideas die in the wait time between meetings.”

Not because they’re bad ideas. Because the tempo of the market has outpaced the tempo of governance.

2. Old governance creates “strategy drag”

Nearly every strategy leader I spoke to described the same symptoms:

• Endless steering committees

• Funding cycles that lag the learning cycle

• Decisions bottlenecking at the same three executives

• “Pilot purgatory” where nothing scales and nothing dies

• Portfolio reviews that look backward, not forward
  

And the heartbreaking part?

It’s not a capability gap. It’s a structural mismatch.

The organisation is ready to move faster, but the governance system is tuned for a slower world.

One leader called it:

“Running a Formula 1 car on suburban roads.”

The car is capable.The track isn’t.

3. The new playbook: Dynamic, signal-driven allocation

The most interesting organisations we spoke with weren’t adding more governance.

They were simplifying it.

And shifting from:

“We approve funding at meetings.” to “We approve funding at the speed of evidence.”

A few patterns kept surfacing:

1. Monthly resource reallocation windows

Small moves (2–5% of capital), but made frequently.

It creates agility without chaos.

2. Pre-approved micro-budgets

Teams get small pools of “decisionable” capital they can deploy without escalation.

It’s not autonomy for everything, just for the early steps that generate signals.

3. Kill/pivot rules agreed upfront

No feelings. No politics.

Just: “If X isn’t happening by Y date, we stop.”

This single change has killed more zombie initiatives than any tool.

4. Strategy-led scenario checks

Instead of waiting for QBRs, strategy teams run lightweight scenario pulses every 30–45 days.

Not heavy analysis. Just: “What changed? What does that mean for resourcing?”

It’s more like a meditation practice than a meeting .A rhythm of checking in, not checking boxes.

4. Three questions every strategy leader should sit with

If you want to understand whether your organisation’s governance is slowing strategy down, here are the questions we've heard from the field:

1. How fast does reality change vs. how fast we fund? If those two curves diverge, execution will always lag.

2. Where does money get stuck?

Every organisation has “capital choke points.” Find them. They tell you everything.

3. What percentage of resource allocation is based on momentum, not history?

Most companies accidentally fund the past. The next generation funds what’s working now.

Where this is heading

Strategy, historically, has been about the plan. But increasingly, strategy is about:

• how capital moves

• how decisions flow

• how fast the organisation can adapt
  

In a world moving at signal speed, the organisations that learn fastest, and fund fastest, win.

Not because they’re smarter.

But because they’ve rewired the machine beneath the strategy.