How do leaders see whether strategy is really moving?
If your governance pack is green, are you actually seeing reality?
Once the machine is running, leaders need line of sight to govern effectively. Not more updates, but enough clarity and trust in the integrity of that information to inform their decisions, so they can make good calls early, before the program or project drifts.
Line of sight means leaders can see:
PACE: What decisions are needed next, and what's slowing momentum;
RISK: What's at risk, and if its being managed;
VALUE: What trade-offs are being made and if its compromising outcomes; and,
TRUTH: Whether what they're hearing reflects reality.
That line of sight doesn’t magically appear in a pack.
Leaders create it through three mechanisms:
1. Decision-grade reporting that surfaces evidence, trade-offs, and unknowns, not just milestones
2. Forums designed to decide, where the agenda is built around the few calls that protect line of sight
3. Direct connection to reality, leaders stepping outside the pack to validate assumptions with delivery leads and business owners, to hear weak signals early
When those mechanisms are weak, governance can look green while in reality the project is fragile.
Early in my career, I saw the impact of this on an Enterprise CRM project. The sponsor was engaged and well-intentioned, but the governance system created a single point of truth, updates flowed mainly through the project manager, and the SteerCo wasn’t routinely hearing from the business owner or the leads closest to the impacted processes. On paper, progress looked fine. The project stayed green right up until UAT.
What wasn’t surfaced was lack of business engagement up front, meaning requirements weren’t locked down, and therefore core end-to-end processes hadn’t been properly understood or validated. Because that reality didn't effectively travel up through the governance mechanisms, it didn’t show up as a clear risk, rather, it showed up later as defects.
By the time UAT started, it wasn’t a few bugs. It was fundamental workflow issues. The program went red fast, not because people weren’t working hard, but because leaders didn’t have enough line of sight early enough to challenge assumptions and course-correct.
Governance that reports is easy to build. Governance that decides, and that surfaces bad news early enough to act on, has to be designed that way from the start. That's part of what Execution sets up.
The practical shift is this: use governance to create line of sight, so decisions are informed and land with confidence.
A simple place to start is to insist that any decision brought to a forum is decision-ready: clear recommendation, options, trade-offs, unknowns, and what would change the call.
This is part of lever 4 (Governance & Decision Rights) of the Strategy Execution by Design Model. See the full framework →
Not sure which of the seven levers is holding your execution back? Take the Strategy Execution Maturity Model Assessment →
Written by Rebecca Reti, strategy and execution consultant working with boards and executive teams across Australia and New Zealand.
There's more on this in the carousel, with practical ways to build line of sight into your governance system. See the carousel on LinkedIn →