The Fog of Strategy Problem
This recurring nightmare scenario plays out in boardrooms every Q4. The CEO puts up a slide that says something like “Strategy 2026: Accelerate Growth and Delight Customers.” Everyone nods. The slide is pretty. The font is nice. But for the CIO, that slide is a nightmare.
“Accelerate Growth” is not a strategy; it is a wish. “Delight Customers” is not a roadmap; it is a sentiment. And yet, IT leadership is expected to take these vague platitudes and translate them into hard technical execution—buying software, hiring engineers, and architecting data pipelines.
When the strategy is ambiguous, IT fails. We end up guessing. We buy “best of breed” tools hoping they align with a mission we don’t fully understand. We become order-takers, reacting to the loudest voice in the room rather than the most critical lever for growth.
One of the biggest threats to IT isn’t budget cuts or shadow IT; it is the Strategic Fog. When the business refuses to be specific, IT becomes a cost center by default. If I can’t draw a straight line between my $2M cloud migration and a CEO’s “Growth” goal, then my cloud migration looks like overhead.
To escape the cost-center trap, we need to move from Goals (Vague) to Levers (Specific). For CIOs and other IT executives, you have to stop accepting ambiguity and instead force clarity.
IT Supporting Growth Levers as the Solution
A Growth Lever is a specific mechanism the business will pull to achieve its number; usually a revenue target. It is the missing link between the CEO’s vision and the CIO’s backlog.
Here is the difference between a Goal and a Lever:
Example 1:
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- Goal (The Wish): “Grow Revenue by 20%.”
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- Lever (The Mechanism): “Expand into the Asian Market.”
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- IT Capability (The Execution): “Deploy internationalization and translation management for Japanese marketing campaigns”
Example 2:
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- Goal (The Wish): “Improve Efficiency.”
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- Lever (The Mechanism): “Automate the Order-to-Cash cycle.”
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- IT Capability (The Execution): “Integrate Salesforce CPQ with Oracle Fusion.”
Do you see the difference? You cannot architect for “Growth.” You can architect for “Asian Market Expansion.”
From Theory to Practice
The process starts by examining a 3-year corporate horizon. Why 3 years? Because 1 year is just firefighting, and 5 years is science fiction. 3 years is the execution window Goldilocks zone.
Growth levers go deeper than vague aspirations, and provide north star routes for how the company will grow. For example: a product-led organization (PLO) may wish to develop 3 new products in the next three years. A sales-led organization may want to cultivate new logos in Asia while expanding the book of business with existing customers in America. Mergers and acquisitions, such as acquiring 5-8 companies over the next three years, may also be a lever.
But here’s the important part: growth levers go beyond simply “what” the company intends to do and enumerate “how much” each lever contributes. These are the hard numbers IT can attach to in order to clearly articulate how IT is growing the business.
Say for example that a given company has a revenue baseline of $10M USD annually, and the goal is to grow revenue by 20% in the next year. Barring organic growth, the simple formula would look something like:
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- Baseline: $10M
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- Existing account cross-sell / up-sell: $1M
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- New logos in Asia: $500k
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- New product ARR: $500k
To help cut through the noise I’ve been using a framework, and a new interactive tool, to visualize this mapping. It forces the difficult conversations early, helping you define the 3-Year Growth Levers and instantly identify the IT gaps that will block them. It’s designed to do one thing: Remove the ambiguity so you can build the bridge.
Summary
Pivoting IT from a reactive cost center to a proactive profit driver is how you secure IT’s seat at the table. You stop presenting “IT Roadmaps” full of acronyms and start presenting Capability Bridges.
You help map the business’s chosen levers, then overlay required IT capabilities. When IT capabilities are attached to forecasted revenue, the perspective of IT can literally change overnight.
Binding IT capabilities (and their associated costs) to revenue growth effectively does three things:
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- Clarity: The entire company actually understands how to align tactics to strategy. If IT is helping to drive this conversation, it lends immense business credibility to the IT department.
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- Value: IT is viewed as a growth engine, not a minimized cost center brought in only for execution.
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- Focus: If a project on your backlog doesn’t connect to a lever, kill it. If a lever exists without a supporting IT capability, flag the risk. Basically do what is important and have a clear narrative for why you mustn’t embark on extraneous projects.
The hardest part of this process is often getting the business to agree on what the levers actually are. Business leaders are often used to staying in the “fog of goals,” and are hesitant to commit to hard revenue projections. My only advice here is: expect to feel uncomfortable. As an IT leader, you’ll feel like you’re swimming outside your lane, because you are at first. Yet I’ll put it this way: you’re going to be uncomfortable either way! You can remain uncomfortable being reactive and getting pulled in at the last minute, or, you can get uncomfortable mapping the company’s future trajectory; showing how IT supports that vision along the way.