Closing The Gap Where Good Ideas Go To Die

There is a version of strategy that lives in boardrooms and decks. It is elegant, well-reasoned, and largely theoretical. Then there is the version that lives inside a working organisation; where the budget is real, the people are complicated, and the gap between a good idea and a working system is wider than anyone warned you.

I have spent time in the second version.

In my dual role as Head of Strategy and Chief of Staff at BellaNaija, I did not inherit a strategy function. I built one, from team restructuring to intra-organisational implementation to multi-sector partnerships to cross-country programs. Nobody handed me a framework. I learned by doing, by failing quietly, and by paying close attention to what actually moved the organisation forward versus what just looked like progress.

Here are five things I would tell anyone stepping into an enterprise strategy role for the first time.

Systems beat ideas every time

The most dangerous moment in any organisation is when a great idea gets celebrated before anyone has asked how it will actually work on a Tuesday afternoon six months from now.

Ideas are abundant bur solid systems are rare. A system is what happens after the excitement fades; the process, the accountability structure, the feedback loop that tells you whether the thing is working. Early in my career I was an ideas person. What BellaNaija taught me is that the real work begins the moment the idea is approved.

If you cannot describe how a decision will be made, who owns the outcome, and how you will know when it has succeeded, you do not have a strategy. You have a wish list.

Sequencing is the strategy

This is the lesson I return to most often, because it is the one that separates good strategic thinkers from great ones.

The what of strategy is usually not the hard part. Most leaders can identify the right direction. What breaks organisations is the when - moving too fast on the wrong thing, or doing the right things in the wrong order.

Look at how MTN sequenced its Ambition 2025 strategy. They did not launch fintech and digital services on top of a shaky foundation. They started with connectivity consolidation, building a base of 291 million customers across 19 markets and then optimised infrastructure, then layered platform services, then transformed the portfolio. Each stage made the next one possible. That is not coincidence. That is deliberate sequencing.

Safaricom did the same in its Agile transformation. Rather than overhauling the entire organization at once, they began with Front Runners, the most urgent business areas, mobile data and M-Pesa, and scaled only after the model proved itself. By 2025, the approach covered 75% of the business. But it started with four tribe leads, not a company-wide rollout.

Source: https://newsroom.safaricom.co.ke/innovation/agile-catering-to-the-urgency-of-the-digital-customer/

I have watched initiatives collapse not because the idea was wrong but because the organisation was not ready for it. A restructuring launched before trust was built. A technology rollout before the team understood why it mattered. A partnership announced before internal alignment was secured.

Sequencing requires you to ask a question most strategy processes skip entirely: what has to be true before this can work? Answer that, and you will know what to do first.

In my own work, I have learned to build backwards from the outcome I want and map every dependency along the way. I often speak about building a "work back plan". Which stakeholders need to move first? Which quick wins build the credibility for the harder asks? Where does the sequence break if one piece fails? That mapping exercise, unglamorous as it is, has saved more initiatives than any strategy deck I have ever written.

The coalition is the strategy

You can have the right answer and still lose if you are the only person in the room who believes it.

Strategy in a real organisation is not a solo sport. It is a coalition sport. The quality of your thinking matters, but the breadth of your buy-in determines what actually gets implemented.

Early in any major initiative, I now spend a disproportionate amount of time on the quiet conversations, the ones that happen before the formal meeting, with the people whose resistance will matter most. Not to convince them. To understand them and to reassess the project from a different lens. There is a difference.

The coalition is not just an implementation mechanism. It is a signal of whether the strategy is actually right. If you cannot get the key stakeholders or team members in your own organisation to see what you see, that is information worth taking seriously.

Measure what you manage

Strategy without metrics is opinion. Strong, well-researched opinion, perhaps.. But opinion nonetheless.

I read BCG's research on AI transformation in African markets and it offers a useful frame here: they found that the organisations succeeding with AI were not the ones investing most heavily in the technology. They were the ones that allocated 70% of their effort to transforming people, processes, and culture and measured that transformation deliberately. The algorithm was 10% of the work. The organisational change was everything else.

The same logic applies to any strategic initiative. One of the disciplines I have built into every significant project I run is defining success before the work begins, not in vague terms, but specifically. What number moves? By how much? By when? Who is responsible for it?

This sounds obvious. It is practiced far less than it sounds.

The instinct, especially in fast-moving organisations, is to start executing and measure later. The problem is that later never comes. Defining the metric upfront forces clarity about what you are actually trying to do, and gives you permission to stop doing things that are not working.

Hire for judgment, not just skill

The most consequential strategic decision most leaders make is not a market entry or a restructuring. It is who they put in the room.

Standard Bank recognised this when building their platform model. Rather than simply hiring new talent, they built an internal Talent Marketplace; an AI-enabled system that matched employees to projects based on skills and interests, bypassing traditional hierarchy. In a pilot, it unlocked 4,000 hours of productivity and significantly improved employee satisfaction. The insight behind it is important: the talent you need may already be inside the organisation. The question is whether your systems are designed to surface and deploy it.

Skills can be taught. Judgment: the ability to read a situation accurately, weigh competing priorities, and act with both speed and care - is rarer and harder to assess. But it is the thing that determines whether a team performs under pressure or collapses.

When I redesigned our performance appraisal process this year, I shifted the emphasis away from KPI linearity and toward how each team member thinks. Not what they have done, but how they reasoned through it. The questions they asked. The assumptions they challenged. The moments they chose to slow down rather than just move fast.

A team full of skilled people with poor judgment will execute the wrong things efficiently. A team with strong judgment will find a way to deliver even when the brief is incomplete, and in African organisations, the brief is almost always incomplete.

The through-line across all five lessons is the same: strategy is not what you plan. It is what you build, sequence, align, measure, and staff. The deck is the beginning of the conversation, not the end of the work.

The most valuable thing a decade inside a working organisation taught me is that execution is not separate from strategy. It is the strategy.

If you are waiting for the perfect conditions to implement, you are already behind. The machine does not build itself.