Has the Strategy Function Become an Organisational Coordination Layer?

The strategy function has always been largely associated with planning.

Building long-range forecasts. Assessing markets. Identifying growth opportunities. Defining competitive positioning. Producing strategic plans that helped organisations determine where they would compete and how they would win.

That work still matters. But inside many large organisations, the day-to-day reality of strategy roles is changing.

Increasingly, strategy leaders are spending less time creating strategy in the traditional sense, and more time coordinating it across increasingly complex organisations.

The job is no longer simply deciding what to do.

Instead the challenge is ensuring the organisation can align around it.

This change is emerging at the same time many businesses are operating under unprecedented levels of complexity. Organisations are managing digital transformation programs while simultaneously implementing AI initiatives, sustainability targets, cost optimisation efforts, operating model redesigns, cyber resilience programs, regulatory change, and supply chain restructuring.

Many of these initiatives compete for the same resources, leadership attention, and operational capacity.

The result is not necessarily a lack of strategic direction. In many cases, organisations have more strategic plans than ever.

This can cause congestion.

Research into strategy execution has consistently found that execution failures rarely stem from poor strategic intent alone. Studies from organisations including Harvard Business Review, PMI, and the Brightline Initiative have repeatedly pointed toward alignment, communication, prioritisation, and cross-functional coordination as major barriers to execution.

This creates an important dynamic.

As execution becomes harder, the strategy function naturally gets pulled closer to the coordination challenges preventing execution from happening.

In practice, this often means strategy teams increasingly spend their time:

• resolving competing priorities

• aligning business units

• facilitating governance processes

• translating enterprise strategy into operational decisions

• managing transformation interdependencies

• supporting resource allocation decisions

• helping leadership teams maintain alignment during uncertainty
  

In many organisations, strategy teams now sit at the centre of multiple transformation streams simultaneously.

This is partly a function of organisational scale. As businesses grow, coordination costs increase. More stakeholders become involved in decisions. Matrix structures create overlapping accountabilities. Decision-making slows as consultation requirements expand. Functions optimise locally while enterprise priorities compete globally.

What emerges is an organisation that may be strategically ambitious, but operationally fragmented.

This may help explain why many organisations are quietly expanding transformation offices, enterprise PMOs, governance forums, and prioritisation functions. These structures are often interpreted as administrative overhead. But in reality, they may reflect something deeper: the increasing amount of coordination required to execute strategy in modern enterprises.

The strategy function is frequently drawn into this gap.

Interestingly, this shift also coincides with changes in how strategic information itself is created and distributed.

Historically, part of the strategy function’s value came from information asymmetry. Strategy teams often had privileged access to market analysis, competitive intelligence, forecasting models, and structured planning frameworks. That advantage may now be narrowing.

AI tools, data platforms, and increasingly accessible research capabilities are making analysis more widely available across organisations. Information is becoming easier to generate. Strategic frameworks are becoming increasingly commoditised.

But while analysis may become more accessible, interpretation remains difficult.

Organisations still need people capable of navigating ambiguity, understanding context, balancing competing incentives, and helping groups move toward coordinated action under uncertainty.

This may represent an important shift in the nature of strategic work. The future value of the strategy function may lie less in producing plans and more in helping organisations continuously align around changing conditions.

In this environment, strategy becomes less about delivering a static answer and more about maintaining organisational coherence while conditions evolve.

This is where concepts like sensemaking become increasingly relevant. Organisational theorist Karl Weick argued that organisations must continually interpret and re-interpret changing environments in order to act coherently. Under conditions of uncertainty, the ability to create shared understanding becomes critical.

That capability increasingly appears central to modern strategy leadership. Strategy leaders are often not simply deciding what the organisation should do next. They are helping organisations interpret weak signals, surface tensions, reconcile conflicting priorities, and maintain alignment across increasingly fragmented systems.

This may also explain why cultural factors are becoming more strategically important.

Execution is heavily influenced by whether teams are willing to share information openly, adapt assumptions quickly, escalate risks early, and coordinate effectively across silos. In highly complex organisations, strategic failure can emerge not because the strategy itself was flawed, but because the organisation was unable to maintain sufficient alignment around execution.

If complexity continues to rise, coordination itself may become a strategic capability.

The organisations that perform best may not necessarily be those with the most sophisticated plans, but those most capable of aligning people, priorities, and resources under changing conditions.

For strategy teams, this could reshape the function over the coming decade.

The role may increasingly evolve from long-range planner toward enterprise orchestrator: less focused on producing static strategies,and more focused on enabling coordinated adaptation across the organisation.

For now at least, that appears to be where much of the work is already moving.