The Missing Middle Between Strategy and Business Unit Work Plans
From Strategy to Implementation: 2 of 3
Organisation-wide strategies are necessarily broad. They establish direction, identify priorities and describe what an organisation collectively wants to achieve.
But implementation eventually has to become much more specific.
At some point, strategic ambition needs to connect with the everyday work of individual teams: their decisions, priorities, budgets, projects, relationships and work plans.
Between those two levels sits an important space that can easily be overlooked.
It is the space where an organisation works out what a strategy actually means across different parts of the organisation.
The distance between strategy and everyday work
A corporate strategy might include an action to strengthen community resilience, improve preparedness, respond to climate risk or increase organisational capacity to manage disruption.
At a strategic level, the intent may be clear.
But what does that mean for an infrastructure team making decisions about assets?
For Finance considering investment and budget priorities?
For Procurement managing contracts and suppliers?
For Community Services working directly with residents?
Or Communications deciding how and when information is shared?
The strategy provides a common direction, but each part of the organisation encounters that direction from a different starting point. Implementation requires those two levels to connect.
A corporate action isn't yet a business unit action
Assigning responsibility for an action is an important part of implementation, but it doesn't necessarily tell every affected team what needs to change in practice.
A business unit may not formally "own" a strategic action and still be important to its success. Its existing work might influence the outcome. It may hold information another team needs. Its systems or processes might enable implementation. Decisions it makes for completely different reasons may strengthen - or inadvertently constrain - what another part of the organisation is trying to achieve.
This is particularly true for strategies addressing complex challenges. The boundaries of the issue rarely align neatly with the boundaries of organisational responsibility.
Different parts of the organisation see the strategy differently
This isn't necessarily a problem. People working in different areas bring different expertise, responsibilities and perspectives.
An asset manager may see infrastructure dependencies that aren't obvious to a community development team.
Finance may identify resource implications.
Procurement may see contractual constraints.
Frontline services may understand how a proposed change is likely to affect particular communities.
These different perspectives can make implementation stronger. The challenge is creating enough shared understanding for people to see both their own part of the strategy and how it connects with the work of others. Without that translation, a strategy can remain something people support in principle without being clear about what it changes in practice.
Translation is more than allocating actions
It can be tempting to solve this by breaking the strategy into smaller actions and allocating them across the organisation. Sometimes that is exactly what is needed. But translation can involve more than dividing up a list.
It also means considering how strategic direction connects with existing work.
What decisions are already being made that influence the strategy?
Where could existing processes incorporate a different consideration?
What knowledge or capability might teams need?
Where are there competing priorities or constraints?
Importantly, it also means recognising that implementation doesn't begin with a blank page.
Organisations already have systems, programs, relationships, expertise and ways of working. Sometimes the opportunity is not to create something new, but to connect, strengthen or use what already exists differently.
Some responsibilities are shared
Complex strategies also create responsibilities that don't belong comfortably to one part of an organisation.
Consider something as apparently straightforward as communicating with communities during disruption. Communications may have responsibility for public messaging, but useful communication could depend on operational teams providing accurate information, community-facing services understanding local needs, ICT maintaining communication channels and external organisations sharing consistent messages.
Giving one team accountability doesn't remove those dependencies.
Implementation therefore requires clarity about individual responsibility while also recognising where outcomes depend on collective action.
Some barriers can't be solved within one business unit
The same applies to implementation barriers. A team might understand exactly what it needs to do but still depend on a corporate system, another department, an organisational decision or an external partner before it can act.
From the perspective of the individual team, these barriers can appear frustratingly outside its control. From an organisational perspective, they are valuable information. They show where implementation needs attention beyond individual work plans.
This is one reason implementation cannot simply be pushed down through an organisation. Some challenges need to be addressed across it.
Connecting strategic direction with everyday decisions
Ultimately, strategies become real through decisions. A budget is developed. An asset is renewed. A contract is written. A service is redesigned. A community program is planned. A new employee is trained. A partnership is established.
Individually, these decisions may appear relatively small compared with the ambitions contained in an organisation-wide strategy. Collectively, they are where much of implementation actually happens.
The challenge is helping people make those decisions with an understanding of the broader direction, while recognising how their choices connect with decisions being made elsewhere.
The missing middle is where implementation becomes real
There is often considerable attention at either end of the process. At one end sits the strategy: vision, priorities, outcomes and organisation-wide actions. At the other sit operational plans, projects and individual business unit responsibilities.
The space between them can receive much less attention. Yet this is where strategic ambition is interpreted, connections become visible, shared responsibilities emerge and organisational barriers can be identified. It is where the question shifts from:
What does the strategy say?
to:
What does this mean for the way we work?
That translation is not simply an administrative step between strategy and delivery. It is part of implementation itself.