Interim Group Chief Strategy Officer — Benefits Recovery

Judgements between the programme report and the operating ledger

Benefits are easy to claim and hard to find. A programme reports that a new process saves time, and the time saved is never taken out of anyone's workload. A digital channel is credited with a lower cost to serve, and the old channel's costs remain. The Interim Group Chief Strategy Officer will face a series of judgement calls about where claimed benefits really are.

The first is what counts as evidence. A benefit that appears only in a programme report is a forecast; one that appears in the operating reports line leaders already use is real. You will decide, programme by programme, which measure settles the question, and agree it with the people who will be measured. The second is when to stop. Some programmes with thin evidence are early and need time; others have had their time and will not deliver. Telling the two apart is the heart of the role, and in a cooperative or mutual, where any surplus belongs to members rather than outside shareholders, money spent on benefits that never arrive has a particular kind of cost. The third is where local judgement should survive. Anyone who has worked across three or more countries knows that some differences in how benefits are measured are legitimate and some are simply protected variation. You will decide which is which, and write the boundary down.

You hold executive authority to act on those judgements. You will set how programme decisions are allocated and the thresholds local leaders retain, and agree the evidence on which spending, resourcing and control decisions rest. You will rule on whether each commitment continues, turn away any proposal that leaves cost or risk unclaimed, and decline investment where the case does not address adoption, dependencies or the downside. Who leads each programme, and how issues reach the committee, will be yours to approve, giving it a regular view of progress, exceptions and decisions still pending.

The 24 months, measured in operations

In the first ninety days, each programme's promised benefits should be restated as operational measures with accountable line owners, and that restatement agreed with the Board Strategy Committee. By month nine, those benefits should be tracked in day-to-day operating reports, and programmes showing no benefit should have been paused or brought to an end. By month 24, the benefits should be evidenced in operations and owned by line leaders, with the committee reviewing them on a set cadence and no longer needing an interim strategist to assemble the picture.

Judgement tested while authority moved

Organisations with at least $450 million in revenue, and 700 people or more in three countries, are where you have led strategy or transformation, including periods when the business had to keep running while leadership authority passed from one person to another. The committee will weigh your experience of professionalisation, succession and scale-up, and expects strategy formation at level 4, with value case, PMO governance and change adoption at level 3. You can give a board committee an honest account of what is unresolved without using it to buy time. A stop decision, for you, does not need the agreement of every country leader, and you will answer for the full term.

From committee to boardroom

First, during week one, the Board Strategy Committee meets you over a private video link to talk about the programme and what evidence of benefit would satisfy you. Week three is reserved for the Risk Committee Chair, who will explore with you the benefits that carry risk if they are overstated. In week five you spend time in person with executive leaders from each function, the line leaders who would own the benefits, and in week 7 you meet the board's directors in full. The longest you will wait after any stage for our comments in writing is four working days.