DC66: Agility and Alignment , Bridging the Gap Between Vision and Day-to-Day Delivery
Part 4 in a 5 part series on what really matters when turning an org around
This series of posts is aimed at those working at the board level, either directly or as strategic advisors. The 5 part series has the following posts:
How Boards Shape Change—and Why Many Get It Wrong
Why boards must engage with culture, tone, and systemic design—not just strategy and performance KPIs.The Metrics That Matter—And How to Keep Them Honest
The five key metrics for growing a customer-based organisation (NDR, CAC Payback, LTV/CAC, Product Velocity, Platform Scalability), and how agile systems prevent gaming and misalignment.Governing Change: Risk, Ethics, and Strategic Control Through Agile Practice
How boards can use agile principles and cadences to embed risk visibility, ethical oversight, and adaptive governance into daily operations.Aligning People with Purpose: Reducing Turnover and Unlocking Ownership (this post)
How agility boosts retention, psychological safety, and operational alignment—and how your Enterprise Change Pattern supports this systemically.Purpose, People, Process, Profit: A Strategic Framework for Board-Level Agility
This final post brings together the core themes of the series into a practical, board-relevant model. It explores how agility, when understood as a strategic mindset—not a delivery tool—supports clarity of purpose, alignment of people, adaptability of process, and sustainable profit. You’ll see how agile principles can help boards lead with coherence across all dimensions of the organisation, ensuring that vision, culture, and execution remain connected as the business grows.
Agility and Alignment , Bridging the Gap Between Vision and Day-to-Day Delivery
What’s the cost of a beautiful strategy that never touches the ground?
What happens when board-level purpose dissolves into disconnected projects, misaligned metrics, and delivery theatre?
It’s more common than most admit.
Too many organisations treat agility as a delivery method. Something teams do, while the board sets direction and hopes for alignment. But real agility, when understood as a strategic operating model, is how purpose, ethics, and value flow from the boardroom to the team level and back again.
This article unpacks how alignment can be engineered, not assumed. And how agility, when done right, builds clarity, ownership, and resilience across every layer of the organisation.
The Alignment Problem No One Talks About
Most organisations suffer from a silent fracture: the disconnect between intent and implementation.
It’s not that people aren’t working hard. It’s that they’re not working on the right things, or worse, they don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Here’s how it usually plays out:
Boards set a strategy, often driven by metrics, capital efficiency, or customer insight.
Middle managers translate that strategy into delivery targets and quarterly plans.
Delivery teams execute, often focusing on velocity, ticket completion, or keeping stakeholders “happy.”
But what gets lost in translation?
Purpose.
Coherence.
The ability to adapt as context shifts.
And most importantly, ownership of the intended outcome.
This misalignment creates churn, burnout, and political behaviour. Teams become disengaged, middle managers defensive, and boards frustrated. The result? Strategy stalls, change fails, and people leave, including customers.
A Real Board, a Hard Truth
One board I worked with had a brilliant CEO, clear, charismatic, and deeply committed to growth. She told me, “If there’s one thing I know I bring to this business, it’s vision and ambition. I communicate it constantly.”
Yet when we ran a two-week diagnostic across the company, listening to voices at every level, the number one complaint from teams was this:
“We have no idea what the strategy is, or how our work connects to it.”
This was a gut punch. But to her credit, the CEO didn’t get defensive. She got curious. She began mapping where and how her clear message was getting lost, through cascading misinterpretations, overloaded middle layers, and a delivery culture focused more on output than purpose.
It was a pivotal moment.
Not just for her leadership, but for how the board saw their role in enabling clarity throughout the entire system.
Why Agility, When Understood Properly, Is a Strategic Tool
Real agility is not about moving faster. It’s about closing the gap between strategy and action, with feedback loops that run from delivery back to vision.
Agility at the organisational level:
Aligns cross-functional teams around customer outcomes, not departmental KPIs.
Embeds learning into the rhythm of delivery.
Enables strategic responsiveness, so organisations can course-correct in real time.
For boards, this means:
Seeing early indicators of misalignment, before it shows up in the quarterly numbers.
Making better-informed bets.
Reducing strategic risk without creating bureaucratic drag.
When agility is seen this way, it becomes a governance enabler, not a delivery toolset.
Enterprise Change Pattern: From Siloes to Systems
To truly embed alignment across strategy, culture, and operations, we use the Enterprise Change Pattern, a diagnostic and facilitation tool, with its heart in change management, designed to bring the right people together at the right time, in service of the right outcomes.
One of its most powerful features is its ability to break siloes, not just in org charts, but in mindsets and governance.
Here’s how it works:
Cross-functional teams form with clear purpose and strategic context.
Risk, compliance, data, and finance are included from day one, not as sign-off gates.
MVPs include governance capabilities, such as audit, traceability, and data integrity.
Changes and their impact happen in real time.
Learnings are shared across the organisation making it easier for other teams/departments to follow quickly with what works.
This is what real governance looks like in agile environments: not periodic oversight, but continuous involvement from the right voices at the right time. When built into operating rhythm, governance becomes a feature of the product, not an external constraint.
Building on Solid Ground – The Product Operating Model
To embed this system into scalable structures, I developed the Product Operating Model (whilst standing on the shoulders of giants), a holistic design that connects product delivery directly to board-level priorities like ROI, customer value, and risk management.
This model rebuilds how teams are structured and led:
Product Managers are outcome owners, not backlog administrators.
Product Leaders coach and govern, not manage.
Engineers and Designers co-create with users.
Risk and compliance voices are present throughout, not added on at the end.
Communities of Practice maintain coherence, share learnings, and surface risk.
This model ensures that agility doesn’t stop at the team level. It scales governance, ethical framing, and strategic coherence across the portfolio, without introducing the heavy bureaucracy that kills adaptability.
Cultural Tensions Boards Must Balance
Boards often focus on culture as a leadership or HR issue, but the reality is more structural—and strategic. High-performing organisations don’t eliminate cultural tension; they manage it well. The role of the board is to notice, monitor, and help navigate these tensions, not resolve them outright.
These tensions are not signs of dysfunction. They are dynamic balances that allow organisations to adapt, perform, and grow. But when one side of the tension dominates for too long—often driven by unchecked KPIs, cultural assumptions, or leadership blind spots—friction builds, engagement drops, and risk increases.
I’ve worked with leadership teams across sectors, and what I’ve seen again and again is this:
Cultural tension becomes visible only when people feel safe enough to talk—and boards often aren’t close enough to see or hear the signals directly.
That’s where agility comes in. Agile ways of working, properly applied, don’t just improve delivery—they make cultural signals legible. They provide rhythm, transparency, and feedback loops across the organisation that make it easier to see where balance is tipping.
Below is a practical board-level guide to the five key cultural tensions and how to monitor them.
What Boards Can Do
Request diagnostics that go beyond engagement surveys.
Pair metrics with narrative data from retros, check-ins, and exit interviews.
Create space in the board agenda to discuss how these tensions are managed over time.
Ask execs how agility is being used to reveal or rebalance these tensions—not just deliver faster.
Most importantly: don’t wait until cultural problems show up as legal, reputational, or talent risk. By the time those metrics appear, it’s often too late.
What Boards and Advisors Can Do Differently
If you sit on a board, or advise those who do, here’s what alignment through agility looks like in practice:
Treat alignment as an ongoing practice, not a quarterly messaging push.
Use agility metrics that track engagement, value delivery, and adaptability, not just throughput.
Ask where purpose gets lost, and how teams are reminded of it in their daily decisions.
Pair outcome-based planning with real-time feedback loops that make invisible risks visible.
And if you’re an enterprise coach?
Help boards and execs see their role in the system. You’re not just enabling delivery. You’re aligning purpose with practice, and making the organisation more human, ethical, and resilient in the process.
Final Thought
You can’t scale purpose through PowerPoints.
You scale it through rhythm, relationships, and real conversations.
Agility, done well, is how strategy breathes.
It’s how vision reaches the ground without distortion.
And it’s how organisations stay aligned, ethical, and impactful, even in complexity.
Coming Next in the Series:
Purpose, People, Process, Profit: A Strategic Framework for Board-Level Agility
This final post brings together the core themes of the series into a practical, board-relevant model. It explores how agility, when understood as a strategic mindset—not a delivery tool—supports clarity of purpose, alignment of people, adaptability of process, and sustainable profit. You’ll see how agile principles can help boards lead with coherence across all dimensions of the organisation, ensuring that vision, culture, and execution remain connected as the business grows.
If you’re looking for strategic advisory or NED support that blends cultural fluency with business rigour, I’d be happy to connect.
If you want to learn from me, you can come on my Organisational Change Strategy course in September.
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