Improving Strategy Delivery – De-Risking the Conversation

Many leaders recognise that no matter how brilliant our organisational strategies are, unless our organisations are orchestrated effectively to deliver them, that brilliance can come to nothing.

Orchestration isn’t just about stronger leadership, sharper delivery skills, or better processes. It’s also about making better decisions – and ensuring we have the infrastructure and business support that enable information-led rather than emotion-led choices.

We call this capability Business Integrated Governance (BIG).

Why This Is a Sensitive Topic

Challenging how strategy connects to delivery – and how governance supports that connection – inevitably touches on power, control, transparency, and accountability.

These are sensitive areas for any organisation. How the topic is introduced – its tone, timing, and framing – matters almost as much as what is being proposed. Without care, even a well-intentioned senior employee can risk:

• Triggering defensiveness among peers or executives
• Being seen as political, idealistic, or critical of current systems
• Surfacing governance weaknesses others may prefer to avoid
• Turning a shared learning journey into a personal crusade

So how can you get BIG onto an executive agenda without getting fired?

A Balanced, Lower-Risk Way Forward

A more effective approach is to combine a thoughtful engagement style with a structured framework for exploring both the challenges and potential solutions.

That’s where Applied Curiosity and the Business Integrated Governance (BIG) Readiness Model come together.

Used in tandem, they increase both the impact and the safety of introducing such a sensitive topic.

What Applied Curiosity Does

As Bekka Prideaux describes it, Applied Curiosity is a three-step process that enables you to use curiosity deliberately. It’s a virtuous circle of Research, Reflection and Reaction. 

In this context, the Research Phase enables you to ask the right questions, in the right way, at the right time – to:

• Understand what matters to different stakeholders
• Discover underlying concerns, motivations, and blockers
• Reframe discussions to align with others’ priorities

When you then Reflect on what you have learned you are able to bring your thinking together and then use this to React and build a stronger engagement and action plan.  It’s not curiosity for its own sake, but a strategic engagement and influence tool that builds understanding and trust before solutions are proposed.

What the BIG Readiness Model Does

The Business Integrated Governance Readiness Model helps organisations assess how well governance is embedded across strategy, risk, performance, and culture.

It provides a neutral, structured way to explore readiness for adopting BIG principles such as:

• Integration of governance into everyday business decisions
• Transparency of accountability
• Data-driven decision-making
• Leadership ownership of governance culture

Because these discussions touch directly on power and decision rights, they can be politically delicate.

The readiness model makes those conversations safer, more constructive, and more evidence-based.

Why Combining the Two Matters

In the early stages of a Business Integrated Governance journey, how you engage people determines whether the effort gains momentum or stalls.

Applied Curiosity provides a powerful guiderail for that engagement. By embedding questioning, active listening, and reframing techniques into discovery and planning activities, leaders create a participative atmosphere where stakeholders collectively uncover challenges and envision solutions – rather than having conclusions imposed upon them.  This not only delivers the best solutions for the organisation but also delivers a joint agency for the delivery of that solution.

This Applied Curiosity-driven approach directly supports the BIG Readiness Model’s purpose of jointly and safely discovering the current state. Via this process, stakeholders become personally invested in the outcome having been part of identifying issues and shaping responses through open inquiry.

Using both approaches can deliver quick, meaningful wins:

• A more accurate and holistic picture of organisational readiness
• Stakeholders who are genuinely engaged and trust the process
• A strong consensus on the case for change

These outcomes create a solid foundation for the next phases – visioning, planning, and implementation – leading to integrated governance that drives greater agility, effectiveness, and efficiency in strategy delivery.

In Essence

Applied Curiosity lays the cultural groundwork for Business Integrated Governance success. It ensures that governance transformation isn’t a top-down directive but a shared mission – one that people understand, support, and actively drive forward, because they were part of its creation from the very beginning.

Using Applied Curiosity to frame the approach to capturing the current state with the BIG Readiness Model enables leaders – at many levels and from many origins within an organisation – to safely table the idea of integrated governance as a means to improve strategy delivery.

For more information:

• Engaging Stakeholders using Applied Curiosity – Bekka Prideaux
• Business Integrated Governance
• Access the BIG First Steps guide

• More about the BIG Readiness Model

• Business Integrated Governance Conference