Author: Julien Haye is Managing Director of Aevitium LTD, a risk advisory firm specializing in risk management, decision-making, and organizational resilience. A former Chief Risk Officer in global financial services, he advises boards and executives on how strategic, financial, and operational trade-offs shape risk and performance. He is the author of The Risk Within and the upcoming Resilient Risk Management, and host of the CPD-accredited podcast RiskMasters. Learn more at www.aevitium.com.
Most organisations believe they manage uncertainty effectively.
Strategic planning processes define priorities, financial projections establish expectations, and risk frameworks monitor emerging exposure. Boards review dashboards, executives track performance, and governance committees assess whether risks remain within acceptable limits. From a governance perspective, the system appears comprehensive.
Yet an important question often remains unanswered: who owns the uncertainty embedded in strategic decisions?
Uncertainty is frequently treated as something that emerges after strategy has been implemented, typically through operational disruption, market volatility, or performance deviation. In reality, it originates earlier, at the moment the organisation commits to a strategic direction.
Whenever leadership allocates capital, enters new markets, or launches transformation programmes, it relies on assumptions about how the future will unfold. These assumptions may relate to customer behaviour, competitive dynamics, technological evolution, or the organisation’s own execution capability. Because these conditions cannot be fully known in advance, uncertainty is not simply a downstream consequence of strategy. It is created by the strategic commitment itself.
The Governance Gap
Governance systems focus primarily on monitoring outcomes once strategy is underway. Financial results, operational indicators, and risk metrics provide valuable insight into whether initiatives are delivering expected performance. These mechanisms strengthen oversight and improve visibility across the organisation.
They do not necessarily address whether the assumptions underpinning the strategy continue to hold.
This creates a structural gap. Strategic ambition is defined within planning functions, executive teams commit resources and approve investments, risk functions monitor exposure through established frameworks, and boards oversee outcomes through performance and risk reporting. Each element performs a necessary role, yet none consistently maintains ownership of the uncertainty embedded in the original decision.
As a result, governance becomes highly effective at observing the consequences of strategy while remaining less effective at governing the assumptions that sustain it.
The Monitoring Paradox
The way signals emerge reinforces this dynamic. Changes in market conditions, competitive behaviour, or internal capability rarely appear as a single clear indicator. Instead, they develop gradually and often across different parts of the organisation. Without explicit ownership of strategic assumptions, these signals can remain fragmented.
Governance mechanisms therefore detect problems primarily once their effects become visible through performance or risk indicators. By that stage, the organisation is already committed.
The organisation monitors what has happened. It does not necessarily monitor whether the premises of the strategy remain intact.
Ownership Follows Decision Authority
If uncertainty originates in strategic commitments, ownership logically follows the authority that authorises those commitments. Strategic exposure does not arise primarily from failures in monitoring systems. It arises when leaders commit the organisation to a course of action based on expectations about the future.
The authority to make such commitments typically sits with executive leadership teams and, for the most consequential decisions, with the board. Risk functions contribute analysis, challenge, and scenario insight. However, responsibility for the uncertainty embedded in those decisions remains with those who authorise them.
Recognising this relationship changes how governance operates.
Governing Strategic Uncertainty
Strategic oversight cannot be limited to monitoring outcomes. Leadership forums must also retain visibility over the assumptions that underpin major commitments and remain attentive to signals that those assumptions may be evolving.
In practice, this can be achieved through relatively simple mechanisms. Leadership teams can maintain a concise register of the key assumptions underpinning major initiatives, supported by a small number of indicators that signal whether those assumptions continue to hold. Periodic review of these assumptions within existing governance forums ensures that strategic discussions address not only outcomes, but also the premises that sustain them.
Governing uncertainty does not mean eliminating it. Uncertainty is inseparable from strategic ambition. It means ensuring that uncertainty remains connected to the leadership structures responsible for strategic direction.
In this sense, strategy ownership includes ownership of uncertainty.