Interim Regional Strategy Director — Controls and Sequencing

Not a strategy author, and not a programme office

The strategy already has authors. What it needs is someone to decide the order in which it happens. That distinction matters, because the failure this seat guards against is not a poor strategy but a sound one launched all at once, so that every initiative competes for the same people and none finishes. Nor is the job to run a programme office that reports progress without the power to change it. The Interim Regional Strategy Director holds executive authority under the Group Chief Executive Officer, and the most important word in the brief is sequence.

What sequencing actually involves

Absorption is a real constraint. Any organisation can only take on so much change at once before control weakens, and in technology businesses the binding limit is usually the people who build and run the platform. You will translate strategic priorities into an order of work that respects that limit, and defend the order when a new priority arrives and asks to jump the queue.

To do that you will fix the regional thresholds below which local leaders decide for themselves, and what evidence a claim on budget, people or control changes must bring in both countries. Each inherited commitment either keeps its place in the sequence or loses it, and that ruling is yours. You can stop a strategy proposal that leaves its cost or risk unclaimed, and decline investment whose value case assumes adoption, glosses over what it depends on or never states the downside. How the leadership is organised, and the route contested decisions take upward, also need your approval. Useful controls should be kept, and the cost of each exception should be visible to the people who ask for it.

A sequencer who has lived through succession

During a succession you have reset who decides, how work is funded and the rhythm of operating reviews, and you have seen evidence move people, money and leadership time inside a technology or digital platforms business. That business earned $910 million or more, employed 1,500 or more and spanned two countries at minimum. The board weighs succession, joint ventures and professionalisation; a joint venture in particular teaches how to sequence work across partners who do not share a single boss. Strategy formation at level 4 leads; PMO governance, value-case discipline and change adoption are each expected at level 3. You expect the regional leaders you hand over to be more capable than those you found. A leader who cannot hold an initiative back while its sponsor grows impatient will not keep the sequence intact.

Sequence agreed, sequence held, sequence handed on

By day ninety, strategic priorities should have become a sequenced plan that the Group Chief Executive Officer has signed off, with absorption limits set and someone accountable for each step. By month nine the sequence should be running as planned, controls that work should still be in place, and initiatives should be held back, deliberately, where the business cannot yet take them on. By month 12 sequencing should be part of the regional cadence, the cost of exceptions visible, and the next planning cycle owned by local leaders.

Selection starts in week one with a video call, held in confidence, with the Group Chief Executive Officer. In week three you sit with the Board Chair and order a crowded set of priorities together. Week five is a face-to-face session with executives who each run one of the cooperative's functions; week seven is with the full board. No more than 2 working days after each stage, a written reply reaches you.