Aligning strategy and operations
Over the past several decades, management has become a key driver of performance by entrusting managers with a central role in mobilizing and developing human resources. This grassroots mobilization effort should enable organizations to combine a drive for action, the achievement of results, and a strong team dynamic.
Our observations, drawn from our experience supporting executive teams and management, reveal a lack of strategic culture among supervisors. While mastery of the business and its processes is a given in most cases, there is a genuine gap in so-called strategic practices outside of Executive Committees. Does this gap not stem from the fact that strategy, a complex field, has long been the preserve of an elite within the company?
For companies, the challenge is therefore real: to instill a strategic culture at all managerial levels, from the Executive Committee to front-line managers, in order to :
- Establish a link between on-the-ground decisions and the strategic vision
- Support and explain organizational or other changes
- Enable stakeholders to engage with technical, financial, and commercial challenges
- Define relevant objectives and align them both vertically and horizontally within the company
- Give meaning to actions for employees by avoiding confusion between means and objectives.
How can we develop this strategic culture ?
Repère et Vision’s approach and practice will be based on several pillars :
OPEN-MINDEDNESS
An organization locked into its own certainties cannot think strategically. The goal is to create the conditions for teams to look outward (trends, benchmarks, weak signals) while maintaining a clear-eyed view of themselves. Cultivating curiosity, tolerating the discomfort of uncertainty, and unlearning the reflex for quick answers: this is what developing a strategic culture means in practice. It also requires engaging leadership to share their visions, information, and decision-making processes, because openness starts at the top.
You don’t understand strategy by reading a report: you understand it by living it. It’s about acculturating the management team to strategic concepts, analytical tools, and facilitation methods not through instruction, but through immersion. This involves collective rituals, regular reflection sessions, and strategic questions posed at all levels. And through leaders who think aloud, who invite others to think together, thereby making the strategy clear, shared, and embodied.
ACCULTURATION
ANCHORING
Reflection is only valuable if it translates into sustainable action. Anchoring means positioning management as a full-fledged player in the strategic arena, capable of linking strategy to concrete decisions on the ground. It also means recognizing and valuing strategic behaviors as they emerge, and gradually embedding these new ways of doing things into the organization’s routines
These three pillars work together. Openness without anchoring produces organizations that think well but transform nothing. Anchoring without openness creates short-term efficiency but closes the door to adaptation. Acculturation is the binding agent; it transforms a strategy conceived at the top into shared intelligence at all levels.
