Eighteen months into a programme, somebody knows the market assumption in the business case is wrong. Name the meeting at which they are expected to say so, and the person authorised to act on it.
Most organisations can answer the first half of that question and not the second. There is a programme board, a steering committee, perhaps a portfolio forum. What none of them typically has is a standing item that asks whether the strategy the programme was funded to implement still holds — as opposed to whether the programme is on track.
The distinction sounds pedantic and is not. A programme board that discovers the market assumption is wrong will record a risk, revise a forecast, and continue. It will do this because revising the strategy is not among the things it is empowered to do, and because the body that could revise it does not meet the programme board.
So the finding stays where it was found. The organisation continues to fund an initiative whose premise it has already disproved, and will keep doing so until the disproof becomes an outcome rather than an observation.
The Strategic Context
The received model of strategy execution runs downward. Corporate objectives cascade to business units, business units to portfolios, portfolios to programmes, programmes to projects. The model is not wrong — the first half of this series works through what happens to a measure on that journey, in [Related article: From Margin to Milestones: What Happens to Strategy on Its Way Down] — but it is only half of what practitioners have long understood to be happening.
Morris and Jamieson, in research funded by PMI, industry and academia and published in Project Management Journal in 2005, are explicit that the relationship runs both ways. Projects and programmes are, in their account, both deliberate vehicles — formal instruments for implementing an intended strategy — and emergent, in the sense that when they are implemented they create new conditions that in turn influence and shape the intended strategy. They observe that not all strategy implementation is downward, and that there is management information and action bearing upward from programmes and projects onto portfolio, business unit and corporate strategy.
Most tellingly, they caution about their own cascade diagram that it should be treated with caution, because it reflects the intended deliberate sequencing and fails to capture the iterative nature of emergent information and strategy modification. That is authors marking the limit of their own model, and it is the most useful sentence in the paper.
Their pharmaceutical case shows the upward flow working as designed. Portfolios were reviewed and rebalanced formally every six months. Emerging trial results shaped therapy-area portfolio strategy. Project managers and project directors took a leadership role in shaping the next phase of implementation, generating proposals that in turn influenced portfolio strategy.
That company had built something to receive what its projects learned. Most have not.
What Leaders Commonly Misread
The first misreading is that this is a reporting problem. It is not, and the distinction matters because the two have different remedies. A reporting problem is a failure of transmission: the signal is generated, compressed through successive layers, and arrives at the executive committee stripped of the anomaly that made it worth sending. That is a real and serious failure with its own treatment in [Related article: Whose Knowledge Does Your Governance System Actually Hear?].
What this article describes is different. Here the signal arrives intact. It is stated clearly in a programme board paper, minuted, and understood by everyone present. Nothing is lost in transmission because there is nothing downstream of the board to lose it to — no forum receives it, because no forum is chartered to act on it.
The second misreading is that a risk register is the receiving mechanism. A risk register records that something might go wrong with the initiative. The finding in question is that something has already gone wrong with the strategy. Logging it as a project risk quietly reclassifies a strategic discovery as a delivery problem, and assigns it to the person least able to resolve it.
Nor is it a question of how quickly a deviation is detected. Designing indicators that surface a problem early is a genuine discipline, treated in [Related article: Measuring an Outcome You Cannot Predict]; it concerns the speed and fidelity of the signal, not what the organisation is empowered to do once the signal has arrived.
The third misreading is that the strategy will be revisited at the annual planning cycle anyway. It will be revisited, but by a group working from a different information base at a different time, and the finding will not travel intact across the intervening nine months. By the planning cycle the programme will have adjusted its scope to accommodate the wrong premise, and that adjustment will look like a delivery decision rather than a strategic one.
There is a related argument that runs the other way and should not be confused with this one: that uncertainty is a reason to plan earlier rather than later, made in [Related article: Uncertainty Is the Case for Planning, Not the Excuse Against It]. That concerns the discipline of forming a plan under uncertainty. This concerns revising the intent the plan was serving.
A fourth misreading is that this is what the sponsor is for. The sponsor holds authority over the initiative — to fund it, bound it and stop it. Authority to change what the organisation is trying to achieve sits elsewhere, and confusing the two produces sponsors who quietly rescope programmes to fit findings they have no standing to escalate.
Reframing the Issue
The reframing is to treat delivery as an instrument of enquiry as well as an instrument of implementation, and to ask what the organisation has built to receive its results.
Every programme is, incidentally, a test of the assumptions in its own business case. It tests whether the market will pay what was assumed, whether the technology behaves as expected, whether the operating model can absorb the change, whether the capability exists internally. It tests these things with real money and real consequences, which makes it more informative than most deliberate research the organisation commissions.
The output of that test is generated whether or not anybody collects it. What varies between organisations is not whether their projects learn — they all do — but whether anything is chartered to receive the learning, and whether anyone has the authority to act on it.
Two consequences follow.
A finding needs a destination before it needs a channel. Organisations that notice this problem usually respond by improving escalation. But escalation to a body that cannot change the strategy simply moves the finding to a more senior place where it will also be logged and not acted on. The prior question is which body may revise the strategic intent, and whether that body ever hears from delivery.
In most organisations the natural destination already exists in the form of a portfolio or investment forum — provided that forum is genuinely selecting between investments rather than supervising work already committed, a distinction examined in [Related article: Is Your Portfolio Function Selecting, or Supervising?]. A supervising forum cannot act on a finding about a premise, because it does not hold the decision the finding bears on.
The evidence is perishable and the cycle time matters. The pharmaceutical company reviewed and rebalanced formally every six months, which is fast enough that a finding from month three is acted on within the year. An annual cycle means the median finding waits six months, by which point the programme has already accommodated it.
Strategic Analysis
Why the people who know are the people least authorised to say
There is a structural reason the upward channel is missing, and it concerns how the delivery role is defined.
Morris and Jamieson report, citing Crawford's 2005 work, that senior managers believed project managers should not be involved in strategy formulation, and, citing Thomas and colleagues from 2002, that project management is seen as strongly execution-oriented and consequently not perceived as strategically important by senior managers. Both are secondary citations; neither underlying study is available here, and both are reported as the paper reports them.
The explanation Morris, Jamieson and Shepherd offer for the first finding is more interesting than the finding itself, and it too is reported rather than adopted: they suggest it may follow from the conceptual definition of project management used in that study, drawn from the era's principal body of guidance — a definition that, on their account, assumes no real involvement of project management in front-end definition, including strategy formulation. The suggestion is a conjecture about one study's method, published in a manuscript the paper lists as submitted rather than in print, and it should be weighed as such.
But it points at something an executive can check directly. If the canonical description of a role excludes it from strategy formation, senior people will infer that its holders have nothing to contribute there — and will design forums accordingly. The definition does not merely describe the role; it allocates a seat, or fails to.
Two of the four companies studied appear to have felt this. The transportation case company deliberately avoids the title project manager, using project leader instead, on the view that the former seems too bureaucratic and does not sufficiently emphasise the required level of leadership. The pharmaceutical case distinguishes a project leader or director from a project manager without abandoning either term, with the leader typically holding the stronger feel for the science and assuming the more prominent role in shaping strategy. The authors twice liken the split to Kotter's distinction between leadership and management.
The pattern is worth naming plainly: organisations that wanted delivery-side people in the strategy conversation found they had to rename the role to get them there. That is a workaround for a definitional problem, and it works, which tells you the problem is real.
How an organisation develops people capable of holding that seat is a separate question with its own treatment in [Related article: From Specialist to Delivery Leader: The Promotion That Is Actually a Career Change]. The question here is narrower: whether the seat exists.
Who is in the room when the finding is discussed
Composition determines what a governing body can hear. Where the people who must operate the result hold no seat, findings about whether the result will work arrive as reports rather than as arguments made by someone with standing — which is why board composition is a governance decision rather than a logistical one, examined in [Related article: Who Sits on the Board for the Benefits?].
What the evidence does and does not support
Morris and Jamieson's survey found that a substantial share of respondents reported managing project strategy in an emergent manner rather than a purely deliberate one, and that most reported some form of strategy input into their project management processes.
Those figures should be handled with care and are offered here only as indicative. The authors state the response rate was about 2%, from 75 responses of which around half came from one country; that the sample is too small for the results to be considered statistically valid; and that the research is at best exploratory. They add that the analysis did not take account of different business sectors and that some questions were reported as ambiguous. What the survey supports is that emergent management of strategy is a recognised practice among respondents — not how common it is in any population.
The case studies are the stronger evidence, and they point the same way. All four companies developed project strategies aligned with corporate strategy; the two most structured managed project strategy across the entire life cycle rather than only at the front end; and in two of them, project strategy was developed and maintained by governance and project leadership teams through business-related processes rather than exclusively through project management processes.
That last finding is the practical one. Where the upward flow worked, it worked because it ran through business governance, not through the delivery reporting line.
The cost of the missing channel
An organisation without a receiving mechanism does not merely miss information. It systematically over-invests in disproved premises, because the only mechanism available for acting on a disproved premise is to stop the programme — a decision with a high political cost that nobody will take on the strength of an observation logged as a risk.
So the programme continues, rescoped, until the premise fails visibly. The loss is not the programme's budget; it is the difference between stopping at month eight on an observation and stopping at month twenty-six on an outcome.
Decision Framework
Four questions, answerable in a single governance review.
1. Which body may revise strategic intent, and when did it last hear from delivery? If the answer to the second half is "at the annual planning day, via a slide", there is no channel. Name the body, name the standing item, name who prepares it.
2. What does each major initiative test? For every initiative above a threshold, write the two or three assumptions it is inadvertently testing — market willingness, technical feasibility, operating-model absorption, internal capability. This takes minutes and it converts delivery into a designed enquiry rather than an accidental one.
3. What would constitute a result? For each assumption, state in advance what observation would count as disconfirmation. Doing this before delivery starts prevents the familiar retrospective argument about whether the evidence was really evidence.
4. What is the cycle time from observation to strategic decision? Measure it on a real case. If it exceeds two quarters, the organisation is structurally unable to act on what it learns, whatever its intentions.
A supporting convention makes the framework work: separate the delivery report from the assumption report. One says whether the initiative is on track. The other says whether the premise still holds. Combining them guarantees the second is read as the first.
From Strategy to Execution
Immediate. At the next portfolio or executive review, add one question to each initiative: what have we learned that would change the case for doing this? Ask it separately from status. The first round produces little, because nobody has been asked before; the second round, a quarter later, produces a great deal.
Medium term. Charter the receiving body explicitly. In most organisations the right answer is the existing investment or portfolio committee, with a standing agenda item and a defined input from each major programme. The change is one line in a terms of reference and a slot in an agenda — small, and rarely made.
Long term. Decide whether delivery leadership holds a seat in strategy formation, and make the decision deliberately rather than by inheritance. A mining and resources business that funds a decade-long expansion learns more about the orebody, the workforce and the community in the first two years of delivery than in all the preceding study work — and whether that learning reaches the capital allocation committee is a matter of who sits in the room, not of how well anyone writes.
Signals to Monitor
- Findings that reappear as risks. Search the risk register for entries that are really statements about the business case. Each one is a strategic finding that has been reclassified into a system that cannot act on it.
- Scope revisions with no corresponding case revision. When an initiative's scope changes materially and its financial case does not, the programme has quietly absorbed a strategic finding on its own authority.
- Business cases whose assumptions are never restated. If the approval-date assumptions are still the current assumptions two years later, nothing is being learned or nothing is being recorded.
- Delivery leaders who describe strategy as fixed. Ask three of them whether the strategy behind their programme could change on the strength of what they have found. The answer tells you what the organisation has taught them about their standing.
- Long intervals between observation and decision. Track one real case end to end. The number is usually worse than anyone expects and it is the most actionable measure in this article.
Questions for the Leadership Team
- Which body in this organisation may change strategic intent, and when did it last do so on evidence that came from delivery?
- What are our three largest initiatives inadvertently testing, and would we recognise a disconfirming result if we saw one?
- How long does it take, in practice, from a programme discovering its premise is wrong to this table deciding anything about it?
- Where in our risk registers are findings about the strategy filed as risks to the project?
- Do our delivery leaders believe they have standing to say the strategy is wrong — and if not, what taught them that?
- Is there any forum in which the person closest to the work and the person who allocates the capital are in the same room?
Closing Perspective
Strategy is usually governed as an output: decided at the top, distributed downward, reviewed annually. Treated that way, an organisation's most expensive source of evidence about whether its strategy is right — the programmes already running under it — produces nothing the organisation can use.
The fix is not more reporting, and it is not more escalation. It is the deliberate construction of a destination: a body that may revise intent, a standing item that asks what has been learned, and a decision, taken consciously, about whether the people closest to the work are allowed to speak to it.
The alternative is what most enterprises run today. They discover their strategy was wrong at exactly the same moment their competitors do — from the result, rather than from the two years of evidence they generated and did not collect.
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