If you’ve been in my community for even a little while, you’ll have seen me mention the 9EOI Strategy Certification.
And it occurred to me that while the name makes sense to me, you might be wondering, “9EOI? What the heck does that mean?” 😄
Fair question.
It stands for Nine Elements of Organizational Identity. But knowing what the letters mean doesn’t help much on its own.
So today I want to tell you why I chose this name for my program, where this framework came from, and why it matters to you.
The pattern I couldn’t unsee
In the early days of working as a strategy facilitator, I’d often stay involved with our clients after the initial engagement – helping the leadership team shape the plan and prepare for rollout.
We’d do the workshops. Define strategic priorities. Get the strategy team aligned and excited. We’d even run leadership enablement sessions to prepare them to lead change.
After a few months, I’d check in with them – or clients would get back in touch – and rather than seeing progress, we’d see the same problem again and again.
Nothing had changed.
And this didn’t happen in just one company or in one sector.
It was across industries, regions, and company sizes – the same patterns emerging.
Even if we had a solid strategy and we trained the leaders, we still ran into the same issues in the implementation phase over and over again.
They’d done the work. But the work hadn’t stuck.
What was going wrong?
Eventually I stepped back and looked harder at the throughline.
Here’s what I discovered.
The strategy hadn’t failed. It was strong. But it wasn’t anchored in the organisation well enough to work.
Most companies would slot the new strategy into the same structures and systems they’d always had.
- Performance frameworks stayed the same.
- Decision-making didn’t change.
- People were still being measured against old targets – and no one had defined the new capabilities the strategy required.
The new strategy became something “on top of” their actual job – something they had to do in addition to everything else rather than a part of their work.
When I looked at why this was happening to see what was missing, it all pointed in the same direction.
The missing elements
Leadership, culture, and strategy are too often treated as separate conversations – each addressed in its own silo, with its own process and language.
But they aren’t. They can’t be.
Strategy needs to be connected to the whole organisation – from the way the leaders lead, to the company mission, to people’s individual targets.
If those threads don’t get woven together – right from the beginning – the strategy won’t land.
No matter how good it looked on paper.
That’s when I began defining the conditions – the elements – that do make strategy stick. There aren’t just the typical 4 that organizations traditionally have, like vision, mission, strategy, and goals. There are in fact 9!
And together they are the Nine Elements of Organizational Identity: the 9EOI framework.
I’ve structured them in three circles.
The Inner Circle: Impact, Mission, Principles
This is the foundation. Your Cultural Core. You start here – always.
It still surprises many 9EOI participants when I say this, but before you define a strategy, you have to define who you are. This is the cultural layer – the part that gives strategy meaning.
Impact is the core piece – the element that is often overlooked or confused with mission.
Impact defines the change you want to create in the world when you do your work well, and helps people connect emotionally to the bigger picture behind their daily efforts.
Without a clear and visible sense of impact, strategy feels abstract. People don’t see how it connects to their work – or why it matters. Once impact is defined, the strategy starts to land. It becomes a shared direction.
Mission defines what you do and for whom.
It’s not aspirational. It’s a clear, practical statement of your field of activity – something every employee can understand and act on.
Principles are the behavioural anchor. They define how people collaborate, make decisions, and lead. They’re what turn culture into something visible and teachable – especially during change.
When any of these elements are missing, the strategy lacks emotional weight.
When they’re in place, everything else aligns more easily.
The Middle Circle: Vision, Strategy Map, Goals
This is the strategic core of your identity.
These are the elements many organisations believe they already have.
But without the cultural foundation underneath – and the management systems to support it – this layer doesn’t lead to real change.
Vision creates direction. It gives people a picture of the future they’re working toward – something they can commit to, not just nod along with.
The strategy map connects your strategic priorities into a coherent whole.
It shows how each priority contributes to your direction – and makes the logic behind your choices visible. That clarity helps teams focus and coordinate their efforts.
Goals break the strategy down into measurable outcomes. They make progress visible.
But if these tools sit in isolation – without the inner circle to give them meaning, or the outer circle to reinforce them – they don’t stick. Strategy becomes a plan that’s understood by a few, and ignored by the many.
The Outer Circle: Targets, Capabilities, Management Systems
This is the Execution Edge, the scaffolding. It’s what makes strategy stick. And it’s almost always missing.
You have the strategy and it looks good, it looks shiny, but then it just falls apart because the scaffolding is not there to hold it in place.
This layer solves that.
Capabilities are critical – for leaders and teams.
Leaders need the skills to guide strategy conversations. Teams need the skills to work in new ways. And both need clarity about what success looks like.
Targets make individual contributions visible and measurable.
Without targets, it’s unclear whether the work people are doing is advancing the strategy – or simply maintaining the status quo.
Management systems reinforce the strategy over time.
They embed it into the way performance is tracked, decisions are made, and progress is measured. Without them, the organisation keeps defaulting to old priorities.
Why 9EOI is structured this way
The elements are arranged in concentric circles because strategy only works when it’s built on a clear cultural identity – and backed by systems that support it.
That’s why the 9EOI Strategy Certification starts with the inner circle: your impact, your mission, your principles.
Once that foundation is clear, we build the strategy piece.
Then we put the systems in place to make it stick.
This sequence is what prevents the usual failure points.
And now, when I check in with clients months down the line, I don’t hear,
“Nothing’s changed. We’re still running into the same issues.”
Because they’re not.
Want to see how this could work inside your organization?
Click here to see what’s inside 9EOI and what past participants have said about their experience and ‘aha’ moments.