January always arrives with intent.
Strategies are refreshed, priorities restated, and leadership teams align around what matters most for the year ahead. Yet by March, many organisations find themselves moving – but not necessarily forward. Momentum stalls, urgency fades, and delivery becomes reactive.
This isn’t a failure of strategy. It’s a failure of sustained leadership.
Momentum is not about speed. It’s about direction, cadence, and judgement. And for boards and executive teams, it’s reasonable to expect their CIO to be one of the primary stewards of that momentum.
Urgency is not a one-off event
John Kotter’s change model starts with creating a sense of urgency – and for good reason. Without urgency, nothing moves. But urgency is often treated as something that happens once, early in the year, rather than something that must be deliberately maintained.
The best CIOs understand that urgency isn’t about panic or pressure. It’s about relevance. They continually reconnect delivery work to the business outcomes it supports – revenue growth, margin improvement, risk reduction. They remind teams why the work matters now, not just why it mattered in January.
Boards should expect urgency to be actively sustained, not assumed. When urgency fades, momentum follows.
One coherent north star
Momentum only builds when people are pulling in the same direction.
In many organisations, technology strategy, business strategy, and market reality exist as parallel narratives. Each is valid in isolation, but momentum collapses when they are not aligned into a single, coherent north star.
This is where CIO leadership matters most. The role is not to translate strategy into technology terms, but to integrate business ambition, commercial reality, and delivery capability into one clear direction.
When priorities conflict, teams hesitate. When direction is clear, execution accelerates.
Pace is a leadership decision
One of the most common causes of stalled momentum is misunderstanding pace.
Projects, programmes, and products do not – and should not – move at the same speed. Early discovery work needs space to learn. Programmes delivering business-critical change require discipline and control. Mature products demand steady optimisation rather than constant acceleration.
Leadership is not about pushing everything to move faster. It’s about regulating pace in line with business priority and risk.
Boards should expect CIOs to make these trade-offs explicit – slowing some work down to allow other initiatives to deliver real value. Momentum comes from the right pace, not maximum speed.
Governance that enables momentum
Governance is often blamed for slowing delivery. In reality, poor governance does that.
Effective governance evolves as work matures. It provides clarity on decisions, ownership, and trade-offs. It removes friction rather than adding process. Most importantly, it gives leaders confidence that delivery remains aligned to strategic intent.
Good governance sustains momentum by making progress visible and decisions deliberate. It allows organisations to move with control rather than oscillating between chaos and constraint.
From strategy to sustained motion
Momentum is created when urgency is maintained, direction is clear, pace is regulated, and governance supports delivery rather than constraining it.
This is what boards should expect from their CIO – not just plans, but sustained motion. Not just activity, but progress that compounds over time.
At Relentica, we work with leadership teams to close the gap between strategy and execution. Aligning intent, delivery, and governance so momentum lasts well beyond Q1.
Strategy creates direction. Execution creates outcomes. Momentum is what connects the two.
