When Everyone Has a Strategy, No One Does

How the proliferation of functional strategies is fragmenting the organisations they are supposed to serve

There is a word that has lost all meaning in organisations. Strategy.

Every function has one now. HR has a people strategy. IT has a technology strategy. Finance has a financial strategy. Marketing has a brand strategy. And somewhere above all of them, there is supposed to be an organisational strategy. Except by the time you have finished counting all the strategies, you have not described a coherent direction at all. You have described a competition for resources.

This is not a naming problem. It is a structural one. And it is destroying organisations’ ability to act.

What strategy actually is

Before examining what functions are doing, it is worth being precise about what strategy is.

Strategy is the pursuit of viability and advantage.

That requires unpacking. Pursuit means strategy is not an output or a destination. It is an ongoing activity, a continuous orientation to changing circumstances. It sets a trajectory: a direction of travel that guides decisions and shapes behaviour over time, without locking the organisation into a fixed end state. That trajectory must be actively maintained, tested against reality, and adjusted as conditions change. You do not do strategy once a year. You pursue it constantly, or you are not being strategic.

Viability is the continuing ability to adapt to a changing environment while maintaining identity. It is not survival at any cost. It is survival on your own terms: preserving what matters about who you are while changing what must change.

Advantage is a position relative to your environment and to other actors that affords you options, freedom of action, and the capacity to shape rather than merely respond. Advantage is not the same as winning. It means you have room to manoeuvre.

With that definition in hand, the question becomes sharper: what exactly are functions pursuing when they call their plans a strategy?

What functions are actually for

Every viable organisation has a structural logic beneath the org chart. Some parts deliver. Others coordinate delivery. Others manage the resources that enable delivery. And some parts look outward, reading the environment, developing the capabilities that will matter tomorrow.

Each of these has a role. None of them is strategy in itself.

Functions sit in the middle of this structure. Their job is resource management, coordination, and optimisation in the service of the whole. They are not independent actors with their own strategic intent. They are capabilities in service of the organisation’s viability.

Understanding this requires thinking about performance in three states.

There is actual performance: what the organisation delivers today. There is capable performance: what the organisation could deliver with its current resources, if those resources were well directed, if decision rights were clear, if friction were removed. And there is potential performance: what becomes possible if the organisation develops and positions itself well for the future.

The gap between actual and capable performance is an execution gap. It is the underperformance that sits inside the organisation right now. Poor deployment. Unclear intent. Skills that exist but are not being used. Systems that generate friction rather than remove it. Authority that sits too high up for the people who actually need it.

The gap between capable and potential performance is latent performance. It is what the organisation could become: the unrealised upside sitting between what it is currently capable of and what it could be capable of with deliberate development and positioning.

Closing the execution gap is the inside-and-now work. Building towards potential performance is the outside-and-future work. Both matter. Both require resources.

Functions own a significant share of the inside-and-now work. That is their contribution. Not strategic independence. Not their own agenda. A clear-eyed focus on what is stopping the organisation from performing at the level it is already capable of, and a disciplined effort to close that gap.

A good HR function does not need its own strategy. It needs an honest answer to a precise question: what is preventing the organisation from realising the performance its people are capable of? The same applies to IT, to finance, to every support function.

When a function mistakes itself for a strategic actor, it stops asking “what does the organisation need?” and starts asking “what should we be doing?” Those questions are not the same. They produce fundamentally different behaviour.

There is one strategy. One.

An organisation does not have strategies. It has a strategy. A single, overarching orientation toward its environment: what it is trying to achieve, what constraints govern how it operates, and what capabilities it needs to remain viable over time.

Everything else is subordinate to that. Functions do not sit alongside the strategy. They sit beneath it, in service of it.

This is the point most organisations miss. Workforce plans, technology roadmaps, and financial frameworks: these are not strategies. They are second-order effects of a strategy. They exist because a strategic direction has already been set, and now something needs to be done about people, systems, or money in response to that direction. The function’s job is to work out what that response should be, given the constraints and resources available.

The moment a function calls its response a strategy, it inverts the logic. It places itself alongside the strategy rather than beneath it. And from that position, it competes for resources rather than concentrating them. It generates its own strategic direction rather than serving the organisation’s. It creates its own narrative rather than reinforcing a shared one.

Understanding why this matters requires being clear about the relationship between strategy and organisation, which is not fixed or linear.

Strategy shapes the organisation: it calls for certain capabilities, certain structures, certain behaviours. It creates the conditions within which people interpret their work and make decisions. But the organisation also shapes the strategy: its structures, relationships, and history constrain what can actually be attempted. What looks possible on a slide looks very different when tested against the organisation’s real capacity to deliver.

And both are continuously interacting with the environment. The environment shifts, the organisation responds, strategy is revised, the organisation changes in response to that revision, which in turn opens or closes new strategic options. This is not a cycle that completes and restarts. It is a continuous loop that never stops.

The practical implication is significant. You cannot design a strategy in isolation from the organisation that will pursue it, and you cannot build an organisation without a clear sense of the strategic demands it will face. The real question is not “what strategy do we want?” It is “what strategy can we actually pursue from here, and what does that require of us?”

When functions pursue their own strategies, they insert themselves into this loop as independent actors, generating demands the organisation never agreed to meet and consuming the resource that the strategy actually requires.

The pet project problem

Here is what happens in practice. A functional leader attends a conference, reads a book, or hears what a peer organisation is doing. They come back inspired. The idea is dressed up in strategic language, a few slides are prepared, and before long, there is a new initiative competing for budget, attention, and people.

It might even be a good idea. That is not the point.

When challenged, most functional leaders do not abandon the initiative. They reach back into the strategy document and find language that can be made to fit. The initiative does not change. The justification does. And because most strategy documents are vague enough to accommodate almost anything, the challenge rarely lands. The initiative survives, reframed as strategic, and the cycle continues.

This is post-rationalisation, not strategy. The direction of travel is reversed: instead of asking what the strategy requires and designing a response, the leader starts with a conclusion and works backwards to find a connection. It looks like strategic thinking. It produces the opposite.

Then the environment shifts. A competitor moves. A market changes. A constraint that made the initiative necessary no longer exists. And yet the initiative continues. Because by this point, it is no longer primarily about the organisation. It is about the leader who championed it. Stopping means admitting the original judgment was wrong. Continuing means protecting a reputation, a budget line, a team, a piece of organisational territory. The external environment is no longer the reference point. Internal politics is.

You see this with major change programmes too. The conditions that justified them evaporate, but the programme rolls on. Governance structures are in place. Consultants are contracted. Leaders have staked their credibility on delivery. Calling it would require a level of honesty that most organisations are not designed to reward. So the programme continues, consuming resources, generating activity, and producing diminishing returns, while the organisation that funded it has moved on to a different reality.

The point is that no organisation, regardless of size, has unlimited resources. Every initiative requires people, time, money, and attention. These things are finite. Every pound spent on a functional initiative that was not genuinely derived from the organisation’s strategic direction, or that ceased to be relevant when the environment changed, is a pound not concentrated where it matters.

Sun Tzu understood this. Concentration of force is not merely a military principle. It is the logic of viability. You cannot be strong everywhere. If you try, you become weak everywhere. Dispersing limited resources across post-rationalised and stubbornly defended second-order initiatives does not create momentum. It creates noise.

What this does to the organisation

The effects are not abstract. They are observable, and they accumulate.

When multiple functions pursue independent agendas simultaneously, the organisation is fighting on too many fronts at once. Each initiative pulls attention in a slightly different direction. Each change introduces new complexity without simplifying anything that came before. The organisation begins to wage war on itself: not by design, but by accumulation. What started as a well-intentioned functional improvement becomes internal saturation.

People lose the ability to see what truly moves the organisation forward and retreat to defending their own area, because defending the whole has become impossible. Execution becomes mechanical. Leadership becomes reactive. The organisation stops learning because it is too busy surviving.

There is a second effect. When leaders become invested in defending their initiatives, the organisation loses something more fundamental than resources. It loses the ability to reorient. Signals from the environment that should trigger a reassessment get absorbed into an existing narrative instead. Evidence that an initiative is no longer needed becomes evidence that it needs more time, more resources, more commitment. The function that should be reading the environment and feeding intelligence back into a shared orientation is instead filtering the environment through the lens of what it has already decided to do.

The feedback loops close inward. Each function reinforces its own story. Data is interpreted through the lens of its own agenda. The organisation stops observing and starts affirming.

This is how organisations drift from reality without noticing. The dashboards still look reasonable. The strategy still reads well on a slide. But the sensemaking has become self-referential. The loop has closed. And by the time the gap between the internal story and external reality becomes undeniable, recovery is far harder than it needed to be.

Coherence does not fail all at once. It erodes, initiative by initiative, strategy document by strategy document, post-rationalisation by post-rationalisation, until the organisation can no longer act as one.

Why coherence fractures

This is the real answer to the question leaders ask most often: how do I maintain coherence when different parts of the organisation face different realities?

The instinct is to manage coherence through alignment: ensure everyone knows the plan, communicate the strategy, and make sure functions are pointing in the same direction. But alignment is not coherence. Alignment is about the message. Coherence is about behaviour.

Functions face different realities because they are genuinely different parts of the system. IT deals with infrastructure and data. HR deals with people and capability. Finance deals with resource flows and risk. They do see different things. That is not a problem to be solved. It is a feature of how complex organisations work.

The problem is when each function responds to what it sees by generating its own strategic response, rather than feeding that intelligence back into a shared orientation and asking: what does this mean for how we close the gap between where we are and where we are capable of being?

Coherence is not produced by everyone having the same information. It is produced when everyone understands the same trajectory, operates within the same constraints, and uses their specific view of reality to serve the same organisational purpose. Freedom of action, the ability to act in line with the organisational direction, within understood constraints, using judgement, without waiting for permission, only works if that trajectory is singular. Second-order strategies masquerading as organisational strategy make that impossible.

When a function launches its own strategy, it sets its own trajectory rather than serving the organisation’s. The organisation does not become more coherent. It becomes more fragmented.

The test

For every functional initiative, three questions matter.

Does it close the gap between actual and capable performance? Is it directly addressing something that prevents the organisation from realising the capability it already has?

Does it build towards potential performance in a direction the organisational strategy has set? Is it developing a capability in which the organisation has deliberately chosen to concentrate its future efforts?

If the answer to both is no, the initiative should be challenged. And if the response to that challenge is to reach for the strategy document and construct a connection after the fact, the challenge has not been answered. It has been evaded.

There is also a harder question for leaders. If you cannot describe the relationship between your functional activity and the organisation’s single strategic direction in concrete and specific terms, without working backwards from a conclusion you had already reached, you do not have a strategy. You have a second-order response without a first-order question.

That distinction matters more than most organisations are willing to admit.

The proliferation of functional strategies feels like good governance. It looks like every part of the organisation is being intentional and disciplined. In reality, it is often the opposite: an accumulation of second-order responses that were never genuinely derived from a first-order direction, dispersing rather than concentrating limited resources, fragmenting coherence rather than building it, and substituting functional identity for organisational purpose.

It also does something more dangerous. It saturates the organisation’s capacity to orient itself, to see clearly, to act as one. The feedback loops close inward. The organisation stops reading the environment and starts reading itself. By the time that cost becomes visible, it has already been paid many times over.

No organisation has enough resources to afford that.

The question is not whether your HR function has a strategy. The question is whether the organisation is closing the gap between what it currently delivers and what it is capable of delivering, while building the position it needs to remain viable tomorrow.

If the answer is no, more strategies are not the solution.

They are part of the problem.