Fix the planningcycle so market signals arrive before internal growth plans, and somethinginteresting happens. The team surfaces real customer insight, agrees it shouldshape the strategy, and moves forward with genuine intent. Then the outside-inview quietly loses ground anyway.

Not throughsabotage. Through the ordinary mechanics of how decisions get made. Nobody isformally responsible for holding the outside-in perspective through theprocess. Nobody has the mandate to challenge a focus area that's drifted backtoward capability logic. The principle is shared. The accountability isn't. Sowhen the internal pressure builds, the outside-in view gives way. And it alwaysdoes.

This is themandate problem, and it sits underneath almost every strategy that starts welland ends up inside-out anyway.

What Ownership Actually Means Here

In mostorganisations, the functions with the clearest ownership in strategy arefinance, which owns the numbers, and the business units, which own the growthplans. Both are well-resourced, experienced at making their case, andstructurally positioned to shape the output. Their ownership is real — backedby process, budget authority, and board accountability.

Customer andmarket focus, by contrast, tends to be distributed and informal. Someone inproduct carries it. Someone in commercial has a point of view. There may be aChief Customer Officer or a Head of Insights with relevant data. But none ofthem have a formal mandate to own the outside-in perspective in the strategyprocess, to ensure that market signals actually drive focus area decisionsrather than just inform them after the fact.

When ownership is distributed and informal, theprinciple survives the offsite but not the planning cycle.

The result is afamiliar pattern. The outside-in inputs get presented: the market scan, thecustomer insight, the competitive signals. They're discussed. They'reacknowledged as important. And then the business units present their growthplans, which were built on different inputs, and the conversation anchors tothose instead. The outside-in view doesn't get overruled. It just loses theroom.

We've seen thishappen in organisations where the leadership team is genuinely committed tobuilding from the outside in. The commitment is real. What's missing is astructure that makes someone accountable for ensuring it actually happens.

Who Owns the Outside-In View?

The answer variesby organisation, but the question itself needs to be answered explicitly, notassumed. In some companies the right owner is the Chief Product Officer, whosits at the intersection of market signals and internal capability. In othersit's the Chief Commercial Officer, who is closest to where customer problemsare actively shifting. In some it makes sense to create a cross-functional rolespecifically chartered to hold this perspective through the planning process.

What matters lessthan the specific title is the mandate. Whoever owns the outside-in view needsthree things: access to the market and customer inputs that should shapestrategy, a formal seat at the planning table before internal growth plans arepresented, and the authority to challenge a focus area that has drifted backtoward capability logic.

The outside-in perspective needs a seat at the tablebefore the internal plans are presented — not after.

Without thosethree things, ownership is nominal. The person might be in the room. Their datamight be in the deck. But the process doesn't require the strategy to be testedagainst their perspective, which means in practice it often isn't.

The Accountability Question Worth Asking

Before the nextplanning cycle, the question worth asking explicitly is: who is accountable forensuring that the strategy we produce is genuinely built around where customervalue is shifting, and not just described that way?

If the honestanswer is "everyone, broadly," the mandate is missing. Sharedaccountability for a principle that competes with more specificaccountabilities will always lose to the more specific ones. Finance owns thenumbers, the business units own the growth plans, and customer focus belongs towhoever has the most energy for it in a given meeting.

Naming a realowner doesn't guarantee an outside-in strategy. But without one, the planningcycle will keep producing what it was designed to produce, regardless of howclearly the team agrees, at the offsite, that it should work differently.