One Strategy That Lands Across Every Market

About this collection

A strategy becomes real in the thousands of small decisions people make when no one is watching. Large institutions rarely struggle to write a good strategy. The harder work begins after it is signed, when a clear decision made by a few people has to become shared understanding, and then everyday behaviour, across many teams, functions and markets. The direction is rarely the hard part at this scale. A returns-focused, customer-led strategy that grows across many markets is clear and well made. The harder work begins when that direction has to become shared meaning, and then behaviour, in businesses and countries with very different conditions and starting points, from the core market to the faster-growing ones across the continent. A rollout can begin in one place rather than everywhere at once. A focused pilot inside a single business, for example Personal and Private Banking, can be connected from the first day to the wider group strategy. Designed this way, an early success strengthens coherence across the organisation rather than becoming one more pocket of good practice that stands apart from the rest. This is the thinking behind our two-movement approach. The internal movement builds the capability inside the building, using the live strategy as the working material. The external movement brings two voices into a leadership forum to give the room the mechanism behind why meaning travels, and to build it together on real material.