During the recent days of extreme heat, I happened to have a great day out at the Northumbrian Water Innovation festival, taking part in a sprint there. This is what formed the basis of what I’m dropping this month.
This isn’t because this is an new avenue of thinking for me. If you read the ‘Leaders on Tap’ whitepaper (Improvement thinking for the water sector – Get Knowledge) which was specifically focussed on water sector leaders and their challenges, then you will pick up a similar thread.
It’s fair to say, my experience on this sprint activity sharpened my thinking and raised the awareness of this idea of mis-aligned strategies back into focus. The overall experience of the team I was working with and the festival as a whole was very positive and I will support again next year (this coming from a sceptical starting position).
In many organisations, strategic plans for themed areas such as people, technology, and continuous improvement live in different corners of the business. They’re carefully crafted, often well-resourced, and proudly launched. Yet far too often, they operate in parallel — developed in silos, owned by different departments, and measured on different terms.
The result tends to be in misalignment, inefficiency, lost opportunity, and change fatigue. People strategies promise engagement and performance. Tech strategies talk about transformation and speed. Continuous improvement strategies aim for quality and excellence. But without integration, each risks under-delivering, or worse — working at cross purposes.
I was part of a sprint that had a high degree of technology focussed people, skills, thinking. My role was to bring into this a people element. You could say I was considering people strategy whilst others technology. It’s worth noting, this didn’t happen by accident. A person leading the sprint had suggested this be the case. It required a leader to bring these differing perspectives together.
Why Siloed Strategies Still Exist
In most instances, I don’t believe siloed strategy exists because leaders want it. They persist because of the way organisations are structured and incentivised (you could argue that leadership created this, but this was probably not their aim).
- Different owners: for example, People strategy sits with HR. Technology strategy with IT. CI strategy with operations or transformation. Each has different timelines, success metrics, and language.
- Competing priorities: In the rush to deliver results, attached to each strategy, each function focuses on its own KPIs. Collaboration is often seen as a “nice to have” rather than a requirement.
- Lack of shared context: Strategies are developed without a shared understanding of what each function is trying to achieve — and how those goals intersect.
- Legacy processes: Many organisations still develop annual strategic plans in isolation, reviewed in steering groups where integration is more presentation than discussion.
“70% of transformation efforts fail to achieve their goals — often due to employee resistance and lack of management support” (McKinsey, 2023).
In my experience I would say that “resistance” often stems from confusion, misalignment, or change overload — all symptoms of disconnected strategies. They tend to all be aimed at the same people!
The Impact on Performance
When strategies operate in silos, organisations can be impacted in several ways:
1. Wasted Investment
A new technology is rolled out — but the people aren’t on board (this is one of the challenges I was supporting at the festival). A new process is introduced — but behaviours aren’t considered alongside. A new performance culture is launched — but tools and workflows don’t support it.
Disconnected strategies will lead to poor adoption, duplication of effort, and dare I say it, people leaving your business (in some cases, obviously not all).
2. Increased Change Fatigue
A stat from Gartner (2022), employees’ ability to cope with change has dropped by nearly 50% since 2019. I’m not sure of how and where this stat comes from but if we consider it. Multiple initiatives being pushed simultaneously, without coherence. There is always a transformation, change or something going on, the least we can do is join it all up.
3. Conflicting Signals
If the people strategy champions empowerment and agility, but the tech strategy centralises control, employees may receive mixed messages. This can show up as feedback around ‘poor communication’ in my experience. The reality is that depending on which leader you here talking on a given day you will get that flavour of strategy bias and possibly a mixed message or 2.
4. Slower Execution
Strategy deployment becomes slow when decisions bounce between functions. Simple changes take months because interdependencies weren’t designed in from the start. I have a people strategy but I need to get approval at every turn because it was designed in silo, given siloed accountability, but is for the organisation.
We should think about integrating more
I would say that high-performing organisations don’t just have good strategies — they connect them. If you are or have leaders that could be deemed as ‘systems thinkers’ (yes I realise that means different things to different people), then this is probably something you experience.
I will never forget asking the HR director of a large organisation, who had just had a change of role to the People & Change Director, what that was all about and how they had decided. In short, they had learned what is outlined above and 10 years previously, leadership had undergone a change in thinking through some systems thinking interventions. They were thinking systemically.
If you can think of strategy not as a series of separate plans, but as an interconnected system. Just as parts of your body work together, strategies must work in sync. When well-integrated example strategies such as these exhibit the following:
- Technology enables people to deliver more effectively.
- Continuous improvement sharpens both tech and people practices.
- People strategy ensures that skills, mindsets and structures are ready for the future.
To underpin this I found these 2 stats from a couple of years ago…
Research from MIT Sloan (2023) found that companies who deeply align their digital transformation and talent strategy are 2.5x more likely to be top financial performers.
BCG (2022) found that integrated transformations — where operational, tech, and people dimensions were addressed together — were 80% more likely to sustain gains over time.
What Leaders Can Do Differently
I’m going to focus on ‘People strategy’ as the base here, as that’s one of my own biases. If you’re a senior leader or HR director tasked with leading people strategy, the real opportunity is to become a strategic integrator — connecting your priorities with other imperatives to create shared momentum.
Some ideas to get you thinking:
1. Build Strategy on Shared Purpose
Before building a siloed plan, co-create a shared strategic narrative. What does success look like for the organisation in 3-5 years? What shifts are needed in capability, technology, mindset, and process to get there? Align your people, tech, and CI goals around that vision.
If you haven’t already you could: Host a joint strategy design session with key leads from HR, IT, Ops, and Transformation. Map out where your priorities overlap, conflict, or depend on one another.
2. Design for Interdependency
When developing a people strategy, don’t stop at culture, skills, and structure. Ask around, what technology is being introduced, and how will people engage with it? What process changes are coming, and how will that affect roles?
The same goes for tech and CI strategies — how are they shaping the employee experience? What leadership behaviour or team dynamics will be required to make them stick?
If you haven’t already you could: Use a “strategy canvas” that prompts identification of cross-functional dependencies. Don’t flag a strategy as ‘green’ unless these are surfaced.
3. Equip Leaders to Lead Integration
Middle managers are often the ones caught between competing strategies. If you equip them with tools to make sense of priorities and join them up for their teams this would be really helpful.
If you haven’t already you could: Offer training or coaching in “integrated thinking” — helping leaders translate strategy into cross-functional delivery, sense unintended tensions, and communicate a coherent message.
4. Start with a People-Centred Lens
While it’s tempting to lead with tech or process, sustainable change always comes down to people. Use people strategy not just as a standalone enabler, but as the golden thread that connects all others. This is the essence of my appearance at the Innovation festival and the desire of that specific leader to begin here.
If you haven’t already you could: Ask the questions, are we building a system that our people can actually thrive in? Are we developing from a basis of understanding core values? Will they feel equipped, trusted, and valued — or overwhelmed and confused?
Not really an option!
I don’t believe it’s optional. Given the changes that are happening, hybrid work, AI disruption, rapid automation and customer expectation shifts, no single strategy can deliver performance alone.
It may have been possible to get away with disconnects in the past but in the future, I believe this will be compounded.
If your people strategy is inspirational but isolated, it won’t stand up to the pressures of the operating environment. If your tech strategy is cutting-edge but disconnected from your workforce, it risks becoming another thing we did once. And if your improvement strategy pushes for speed and efficiency without aligning with culture, you risk having great processes on paper but poor execution in reality.
So, if you are leading on strategy, maybe a key question you could ask, if you haven’t started already…
“How do these strategic themes come together to make us better, faster, more resilient, and more human?”