15) Kari Olrud Moen om strategi, kunsten å velge bort og forskjellen på å være tydelig og skråsikker
Truls Jørgensen og Audun Fauchald Strand — Heis Podcast · podcast · 2026-04-20 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
Strategy is the disciplined act of choosing what NOT to do, justified by a credible read of where the world is going; doing it well requires leaders who are clear (tydelig) about direction without being dogmatic (skråsikker) about what they cannot yet know, and who keep the chosen direction connected, top and bottom, to what the organization is actually capable of and willing to move on.
practical · mixed — A conversational, mixed-form interview that is ultimately practical — it argues (mostly implicitly) for how leaders ought to do strategy in large organizations. It uses expository explanations of strategy concepts (deselection, must-win-battles, top-down/bottom-up) and narrative case studies (DNB/VIPS, Schibsted/Finn, Spotify company bets, climate, AI) to ground prescriptions about how to set direction, when to be clear, and when to stay round in the corners.
Structure
| Part | Role |
|---|---|
| Opening framing by the hosts: their NAV-era encounter with Kari (writing 'teknisk retning' bottom-up, then needing help with a virksomhetsstrategi) and Kari's CV (McKinsey, DNB head of strategy, State Secretary at the Ministry of Finance, now CEO of Finans Norge). | Context and authority establishment; signals that the conversation will treat strategy as a practical leadership craft, not an academic exercise. |
| Definitional core: strategy is 'å velge bort' (Torger Reve, NHH). Two essential elements — saying that something is more important than something else, AND grounding that in a view of how the world is moving. | Provides the conceptual spine of the entire conversation. Everything later is either an application, qualification, or counter-pull on this definition. |
| Time-horizon and sector discussion: 3-year horizons useful for organizational change; public-sector strategy collapses into tactics (constrained by Stortinget, regjeringserklæring); private sector has more autonomy. | Calibration — adjusts the strategy concept for organizational scale and political constraint. |
| Top-down vs. bottom-up exchange. Olrud Moen's answer: neither alone works; the art is making the two cohere so that direction-from-above is intelligible (not necessarily agreed-with) below. | Resolves an apparent dichotomy into a coherence problem; introduces the connective tissue requirement. |
| The VIPS narrative (and earlier Schibsted/Finn parallel) — DNB cannibalizing its own personmarked because the ship couldn't turn fast enough. Rune Bjerke 'var ikke utydelig.' Tempo over breadth in the decisive moment. | Case study that supports the prescriptive claim that some big bets require a clear top-down call AND a credible 'verdensbilde' — and that being clear (tydelig) at the decisive moment is non-negotiable. |
| Introduction of the central distinction: 'hvor går grensen mellom tydelig og skråsikker?' Olrud Moen ties it back to bottom-up understanding — being skråsikker without grounding is mismatch and lack of forankring. | Names the conceptual axis the episode title promises; locates the failure mode of strategy on the over-clarity side. |
| Must-win-battles: limit yourself to two-three-four things; the discipline of saying what is more important. | Operationalizes deselection. |
| Olrud Moen's own admission of difficulty when she joined Finans Norge: she chose to be 'rundere i kanten' rather than skråsikker until she had 'mer kjøtt på benet' after three years. | Self-deprecating evidence of how the tydelig/skråsikker distinction is actually navigated by a practitioner — and an implicit defense of epistemic humility on entry. |
| Bringing the organization along: change is hard precisely because strategy means asking people to do what they would not otherwise do — stop something, do it differently, accept fewer resources. Examples of the 'kjipe oppgavene' as the real leadership work. | Locates the actual cost of strategy in human and political terms; explains why 'henger sammen' is hard. |
| Culture vs. strategy: Olrud Moen pushes back against the 'culture eats strategy for breakfast' cliché — it's not either/or; in DNB she experienced not one culture but many (siloed business areas). | Refines the cultural ground on which strategy lands; introduces the Vipps/Klarna 'tillit' example (Christian Pynsell-Havarsen) as a case where a strong trust culture makes strategy operationalizable. |
| Strategy at multiple altitudes — IT strategy, technology strategy, platform strategy — risk of cascading documents that don't connect. Strategy as an exercise in abstraction: detailed enough that people understand, abstract enough that lower levels can specify. | Addresses the multi-level problem and reinforces that what you DON'T put in the top-level strategy is often where the deselection actually happens. |
| Spiss-spørsmålet: how to be sharp inside a large organization. Answer: not so much sharp on WHAT, as sharp on HOW — on values like tempo vs. error-tolerance. | Resolution of how a leader keeps directional sharpness without over-constraining a large operation. |
| AI digression: hype, maturation, productivity gain rather than mass job loss; historical analogy to the printing press. | Topical aside that illustrates her general posture — refusing both hype and dismissal; modeling 'tydelig uten skråsikker' on a contested topic. |
| Climate as strategic problem: the long-term being velgt bort because short-term threats crowd it out; Finans Norge has a bærekraft-avdeling but you now have to actively remind people. | Pointed example of deselection going the wrong way — the urgent driving out the important. |
| Closing recapitulation: 'se fra toppen' AND 'henge sammen med det du faktisk driver med' — otherwise the PowerPoint is worthless. | Restatement of unity; sealed with a memorable contempt for strategy-as-artifact. |
Key terms
- Velge bort Strategy & Direction-Setting
The deliberate act of saying what the organization will NOT do — naming things to stop, deprioritize, or close. Olrud Moen treats this as the irreducible core of strategy (per Torger Reve, NHH), and as the hardest thing for leaders because people, accomplishments, and identity sit behind every candidate for deselection. - Tydelig Strategy & Direction-Setting
Being clear about direction, priorities, and the rationale that connects them — clear enough that the organization can act, including the unhappy parts of it. Tydelig is grounded in understanding of the operation (bottom-up) and the world (the 'where things are moving' premise). - Skråsikker Strategy & Direction-Setting
Being assertively certain about a direction in a way that is NOT grounded in actual understanding of the operation, the world, or the constraints — clarity without earned warrant. The failure mode where 'det skal se så bra og tydelig ut' but 'hvis det ikke har noen forankring så hjelper det ikke.' On entry to a new role, Olrud Moen explicitly refused to be skråsikker until she had 'kjøtt på benet.' - Henge sammen / få det til å henge sammen Strategy & Direction-Setting
Coherence between top-down direction and bottom-up reality, and between strategy levels (corporate → IT → platform). The connective work that prevents strategy from becoming 'nok et dokument i skuffen.' - Forankring Strategy & Direction-Setting
The understanding and consent of the people who must execute — without which a clear-looking strategy fails. Connected to bottom-up grounding. - Must-win battles Strategy & Direction-Setting
The two-to-four (often three) initiatives a leader chooses as the things they MUST succeed at to unlock everything else. The operational shape of deselection — limiting attention and resources to a small set. - Rundere i kanten
'Rounder in the corners' — the deliberate softening of conviction when entering a new role or topic where one does not yet have the operational understanding to be sharp without being skråsikker. - Company bets Strategy & Direction-Setting
Discussed via the Spotify example (introduced by a host): high-altitude strategic injections from the top that the organization could not have produced bottom-up (e.g., 'now we do podcasts'). Legitimate as rare instruments; corrosive of legitimacy if used too often. - Tålmodig utålmodig
'Patient impatient' — the leadership balance between letting change land at the organization's pace and using sharp examples to keep direction visible. - Burning platform
Reference invoked to note that strategy is easiest to justify when the external pressure is large and visible (regulation, capital requirements, technology shifts); much harder when the case is gradual. Implicit: most real strategy work happens in the absence of a burning platform. - Kultur spiser strategi til frokost
The Peter Drucker-attributed cliché ('culture eats strategy for breakfast') — which she explicitly resists as a false either/or. Culture and strategy are not substitutes; strong culture amplifies strategy in either direction (including the wrong one). - Toppen / gulvet Go to the Floor (Gemba)
'The top / the floor' — her vocabulary for the strategic altitude problem. The host pair use 'gulvet' for where value creation actually happens; she uses 'toppen' for the leader's vantage. The central problem is that the top is many lag above the floor and has only two tools (strategy, organization) — which makes coercive use of those tools tempting and dangerous.
Propositions
- explicitcorroboratedStrategy is fundamentally the act of deselection — saying what NOT to do.conf: highextends ←Dare to Be Bad at Something (From Fixable) · p2 — Fixable adds a second, less-discussed axis to Moen's deselection framing: not just what to stop doing entirely, but what to keep doing while deliberately doing it badly.supports ←What New CEOs Get Wrong About the Job · p19 — Near-identical convergent claim from an independent source: strategy is fundamentally the act of deselection — deciding what not to do — stated almost word-for-word by both Nohria (citing a colleague) and Olrud Moen.
- explicitA strategy requires two elements: a priority ranking AND a credible read of how the world is moving.conf: high
- explicitBeing tydelig (clear) is a virtue; being skråsikker (dogmatically certain) without grounding is its failure mode.conf: high
- explicitClarity is earned by understanding the operation, not asserted by position; therefore a new leader should be 'rundere i kanten' until they have 'kjøtt på benet.'conf: high
- explicitTop-down and bottom-up are not alternatives but two halves of a coherence problem — direction from above must be intelligible and credible on the floor, even where it is not agreed with.conf: high
- explicitSome strategic moves require speed over breadth — you cannot ask everyone what they think, because perspectives are too divergent and the window will close.conf: high
- explicitStrong, clear leadership only helps if it is pointed in the right direction; otherwise sterk og tydelig accelerates the wrong outcome.conf: high
- explicitThe real leadership work in strategy is the 'kjipe oppgavene' — handling disagreement, reduced resources, and asking people to stop doing things they value.conf: high
- explicitCulture and strategy are not substitutes; one does not 'eat' the other — both are required, and strong culture amplifies whatever direction is set (including the wrong one).conf: high
- explicitSharpness in a large organization is more achievable on HOW (e.g., tempo vs. error-tolerance trade-offs) than on WHAT (concrete implementation).conf: high
- explicitTop-down 'company bets' (Spotify's term, introduced by the host) are a legitimate but scarce instrument — used too often, they erode the legitimacy of bottom-up work.conf: high
- explicitStrategy is finally an exercise in abstraction — detailed enough to direct, abstract enough to leave room for lower levels to specify their own.conf: high
- explicitPublic-sector 'strategy' collapses largely into tactics because the long-term direction is set by the regjeringserklæring and Stortinget.conf: high
- explicitdevelopedThe deselection logic also operates pathologically — short-term urgency drives out long-term importance (climate has been pushed off the agenda by acute crises).conf: highextends ←3 Questions to Pressure-Test Your Priorities · p5 — Extends Moen's observation that short-term urgency pathologically displaces long-term importance into an operational leadership test (the Compounding Test) for catching that displacement decision-by-decision.
- implicitA leader without operational connection only has two tools — strategy and organization — and is tempted to over-use them precisely because they are blunt.conf: high
- implicitStrategy is the answer to a structural problem of organizational scale — the floor knows the work but cannot see the whole; the top can see the whole but cannot direct the work.conf: high
- implicitTrust culture is what makes lightweight, non-bureaucratic operationalization of strategy possible (Vipps platform consolidation example).conf: high
- explicitA three-year horizon is the practical sweet spot for organizational strategy — long enough to redesign and reorganize, short enough to feel urgent.conf: medium
- explicitBringing the organization along on incremental change is harder than on dramatic change because the case for justification is weaker.conf: high
- explicitSubcultures with distinct incentives require an over-clear strategy and possibly an explicit culture strategy.conf: high
Arguments
Strategy is fundamentally deselection grounded in a view of the world. strength: high
Explicit premises:
- You cannot say everything is important — there are real resource and attention constraints.
- Saying 'this matters more than that' requires a justification — namely, where the world is going.
- Therefore strategy at minimum names what is more important AND why that is the right ranking now.
Implicit premises:
- The default organizational tendency is to add, preserve, and continue — leadership exists to counter that drift.
- Without explicit deselection, the operating system silently optimizes for what is easiest to keep doing.
Inferences:
- If your strategy contains no named deselections, it is not a strategy.
- A leader who cannot articulate the 'world is moving toward X' premise has no warrant to ask others to choose-not-to.
Being clear is necessary; being dogmatic is corrosive — and the difference is forankring. strength: high
Explicit premises:
- Direction that 'looks good and clear' without grounding does not move the organization.
- Without forankring, no one stands behind execution.
- On the other hand, you cannot wait for full consensus on every move — sometimes you must decide and 'tørre å bare satse' (VIPS).
Implicit premises:
- Forankring is a property the leader earns through understanding the operation, not a property of the artifact or title.
- Epistemic humility on entry is part of how forankring is acquired.
- The same surface behavior (sharp direction) can be virtuous or corrosive depending on its epistemic ground.
Inferences:
- Therefore the tydelig/skråsikker distinction is not about style or volume — it is about whether the leader actually understands the operation and the world well enough to warrant the sharpness.
- Therefore a leader's first move in a new role should be diagnostic, not directive — unless there is a visible crisis.
Top-down direction is legitimate but expensive; over-use destroys the bottom-up legitimacy it depends on. strength: high
Explicit premises:
- Some moves (VIPS, Spotify podcasts, Schibsted cannibalizing aviser med Finn) cannot emerge bottom-up — the local view cannot want a competitor to itself.
- Tempo and decisiveness are required at the moment of choice.
- But if 'company bets' arrive monthly, the rest of the organization stops believing its own work matters.
Implicit premises:
- Bottom-up legitimacy is a finite resource that top-down decisions spend.
- The leader must therefore ration high-altitude bets and reserve them for moves that genuinely cannot emerge from below.
Inferences:
- Top-down moves should be scarce and load-bearing — not a default reflex.
- A leader whose only tools are strategy and reorganization will tend to overuse both.
Culture and strategy are complementary; the cliché that culture eats strategy hides the real claim — culture is the multiplier on whatever strategy is set. strength: medium
Explicit premises:
- Strong culture amplifies direction.
- Strong culture can amplify the WRONG direction (DNB silos kept business areas from learning from each other).
- Vipps platform transformation worked because the culture of trust allowed lightweight steering ('tror vi at vi klarer tvisten? Ja eller nei?').
Implicit premises:
- Treating culture and strategy as substitutes lets leaders avoid the hard work of doing both.
- Culture work is itself a kind of strategy work (kulturstrategi) when subcultures pull against the chosen direction.
Inferences:
- A strategy that ignores culture will be slow; a culture that ignores strategy will be aimless.
- The leader's job includes diagnosing which culture(s) actually exist before claiming what direction will land.
In a large organization, sharpness should live more on HOW than on WHAT. strength: medium
Explicit premises:
- At sufficient scale, the strategy cannot dictate concrete implementation without becoming micromanagement.
- But trade-offs like tempo vs. error-tolerance are felt everywhere and can be made sharp.
- If you pick implementation specifics from the top, you go 'for dykt ned.'
Implicit premises:
- Operating principles propagate further than operating decisions in large organizations.
- The role of the top is to set the few sharp trade-offs that nobody else has the authority to set.
Inferences:
- A useful test for top-level strategy: does it sharpen the trade-offs people face in their own work, without telling them how to make them?
Deselection done badly is not strategic — it can be defensive (avoiding the hard explanation) or systemic (urgent crowding out important, e.g. climate). strength: medium
Explicit premises:
- Strategy is choosing what NOT to do.
- Climate is a long-term issue that is increasingly velgt bort because of short-term crises.
- The same logic that produces good strategic focus can produce harmful neglect.
Implicit premises:
- The mechanics of deselection are morally neutral — what makes deselection strategic is the WHY, not the act itself.
- The 'verden beveger seg i en eller annen retning' premise can be misread or hijacked by urgency.
Inferences:
- Therefore the warrant clause ('where the world is going') is doing more work than the deselection clause — it is the source of legitimacy.
- A leader has a responsibility to keep the long-horizon view alive against the gravitational pull of the urgent.
Narratives
- The hosts' encounter with Kari while at NAV: they had been working bottom-up on 'teknisk retning' but found themselves needing to participate in a virksomhetsstrategi; she helped them reduce big ambitions ('alt skulle beskrives, alt skulle fikses') down to a small number of must-win-battles.
→ Demonstrates the proposition that deselection is the hard, useful work — and that even bottom-up technologists eventually need the top-level framing. - DNB and Vipps: with mobile payments coming fast (mobile-Pay in Denmark visible), DNB faced the choice to go alone or bring all of bank-Norge along. Earlier attempts (with Telenor) had failed because the tech was not yet good enough. Rune Bjerke 'var ikke utydelig' about the direction. The personmarked head was 'intellektuelt sett enig' but had to accept the discomfort of building a competitor to his own business.
→ Supports both halves of the unity simultaneously — deselection (cannibalize personmarked's revenue stream) AND tydelig leadership (Bjerke's clarity was a precondition for the move actually happening). Also supports the 'tempo over breadth' proposition. - Schibsted building Finn: knowing the avisene's annonsemarked was deteriorating, they built a web platform that would take their own market.
→ Parallel to Vipps — a top-down strategic move that bottom-up logic could not have produced because the existing business area's interests opposed it. Supports the 'top-down is legitimate when local view structurally cannot want the move' proposition. - Spotify's 'company bets' mechanism: top leadership decides 'now we do podcasts' — a bet that no team would have proposed bottom-up — and it works as a strategic injection AS LONG AS it remains rare. Used too often, it destroys the legitimacy of bottom-up work.
→ Concretizes the conditions under which top-down direction is healthy; supports the argument that high-altitude bets are scarce instruments. - Olrud Moen joining Finans Norge three years ago: she deliberately chose to be 'rundere i kanten' rather than skråsikker because she was new and didn't yet know how things actually worked. Now, after three years, she can 'mene mer.'
→ Embodies the prescriptive claim that clarity is earned by understanding, not asserted by position — the practitioner's own example of navigating the tydelig/skråsikker distinction temporally. - Vipps' technical platform consolidation across the Nordics (per Kristian Pynsell-Havarsen on an earlier Heis episode): steered without a heavyweight project model, using a single trust-based question — 'tror vi at vi klarer tvisten? Ja eller nei?' — that the whole organization could honestly answer.
→ Illustrates how strong trust culture enables lightweight strategy operationalization, supporting the culture-strategy complementarity argument. - DNB's siloed culture(s) circa 2006 — five or six near-independent business areas with no real cross-area benefit, transformed over twenty years (largely by technology and integrated markets) into something more coherent.
→ Shows that 'culture' is often plural in large organizations and that strategy may need to dismantle internal cultures, not just deploy on top of them. - The climate analogy at the end: previously bærekraft was integrated into every conversation; now Finans Norge has a dedicated bærekraft-avdeling and has to actively remind people of its importance because acute crises (wars, short-term threats) have crowded it out.
→ Illustrates pathological deselection — the same mechanism that produces strategic focus also produces systemic neglect of long-horizon issues; an implicit warning about the moral neutrality of 'velge bort.' - Brief AI digression: comparing the current moment to the introduction of the push-button (or the move from typing in programming languages to clicking buttons) — every layer of abstraction provokes the worry that 'work is going away' but really raises the level at which work happens.
→ Models her general posture (tydelig uten skråsikker) on a contested topic — refuses both hype and dismissal, takes a long view.
Questions addressed
- ✅ What is strategy, and what makes it more than 'nok et dokument i skuffen'?
Strategy is deselection grounded in a view of where the world is going; it survives the drawer only by cohering with what the organization can and is willing to do. - ✅ Where is the line between being clear and being dogmatic?
The line is forankring — whether the clarity is grounded in understanding of the operation and the world. Same surface behavior is virtuous (tydelig) when grounded and corrosive (skråsikker) when not. - ✅ How do you do strategy across top-down and bottom-up tensions in a large organization?
Reject the dichotomy; treat them as a coherence problem. Direction from above must be intelligible on the floor; bottom-up understanding must inform what top-level direction is even credible. - ✅ How long should a strategy last?
Roughly three years for organizational change; the very-short and very-long horizons matter most, the in-between less. Public-sector horizons are set by political cycles and erklæringer. - ✅ What is the right relationship between strategy and culture?
Complementary, not substitutive. Strong culture amplifies whatever direction is set; strong subcultures may require an explicit culture strategy on top of the operating strategy. - ⭕ How do you bring an organization along on a strategic shift, especially when the change is gradual rather than dramatic?
She acknowledges this is the hardest thing — gradual changes are harder to justify than dramatic ones; tålmodig utålmodig and sharp examples help, but there is no clean technique. - ✅ How can a leader be sharp without being micro-manager-ish in a large operation?
Be sharp on HOW (e.g., tempo vs. error-tolerance) rather than on WHAT (concrete implementation). - ⭕ What is the cost to the people who lose the deselected options?
Implicitly acknowledged ('det er noen folk bak' behind what gets cut; 'noen blir happy, og noen blir unhappy'; the 'kjipe oppgavene') but never developed as its own analytical thread. - ⭕ Can the 'velge bort' logic be wrong — defensive, ideological, or systemically harmful?
The climate example shows she sees this, but the conversation does not develop a criterion for distinguishing strategic deselection from pathological deselection.
Gaps
- incompleteThe criterion that distinguishes strategic deselection from defensive or pathological deselection is named (the climate example) but not developed. When the urgent legitimately overrides the important and when it doesn't is left unanalyzed.
Read next: John Cutler on institutional overload (TBM 412) and the cost of context collapse; Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers for a more analytical theory of when narrowing is value-creating vs. value-destroying; Roger Martin's 'Playing to Win' for the 'winning aspiration → where to play → how to win' chain that forces the warrant question explicitly. - incompleteThe people on the wrong side of deselection ('det er noen folk bak') are acknowledged but their experience and what leaders owe them is not analyzed. The 'kjipe oppgavene' frame keeps it at the level of leader-discomfort rather than treating the human cost as its own analytical object.
Read next: Annie Duke's 'Quit' for the ethics and cognition of stopping; Cutler on accountability culture vs. blame; literature on layoffs/restructuring as legitimacy work. - incompleteThe leader's epistemic warrant — what makes their read of 'how the world is moving' credible — is treated as given, not interrogated. The interview repeatedly invokes 'forankring' for the operation but does not ask: how does a leader earn (and update) forankring on the world?
Read next: Annie Duke's 'Thinking in Bets' on calibration and the cost of being skråsikker about probabilistic claims; Philip Tetlock's 'Superforecasting' on the discipline of holding views with degrees of confidence; Donella Meadows' 'Thinking in Systems' on how leverage points are usually mis-identified.closed byWhat New CEOs Get Wrong About the Job — That gap asks how a leader earns and updates a credible read of 'how the world is moving' (forankring) rather than treating it as given. Nohria supplies a concrete mechanism: deliberately overweight time with frontline employees and customers over the normal reporting chain, and cultivate a small circle of agenda-less truth-tellers — because information demonstrably degrades in fidelity ('Cornflakes to Frosted Cornflakes') the closer it gets to the top. - incompleteThe HOW-sharpening proposal (be sharp on tempo vs. error-tolerance, not on implementation) is offered as a resolution but not tested against the failure modes of values-as-strategy (where 'speed over perfection' becomes a slogan everyone reinterprets locally).
Read next: Cutler on operating systems and 'making the trade-off visible'; DORA/Accelerate on what concrete operating principles actually correlate with outcomes; Beck's Tidy First? framing for how small-scale design decisions encode strategic posture. - incompleteThe relationship between 'kompani-bets' and the legitimacy economy of an autonomous team-of-teams organization is sketched but not modeled. How many bets per year? Who funds them? How does the organization recover from a bet that fails publicly?
Read next: Spotify's own writings on the post-bets era and what replaced it; Marty Cagan / SVPG on product strategy at scale; Cutler on directly-responsible-individuals and accountability when top-down moves intrude. - incompletePublic-sector strategy is dismissed as 'mer taktikk' but the conversation does not return to it. Whether public-sector leaders can do something like deselection (and what its political constraints look like) is a productive missing thread for a podcast whose hosts work in NAV-adjacent contexts.
Read next: Mark Moore on public value; Mariana Mazzucato on mission-led public strategy; specific Norwegian writing on NAV and Statens forvaltningsapparat strategy work. - incompleteStrategy as power is gently visible (who gets the IT-køen priority that Vips got) but not analyzed as power. The political economy of must-win-battles inside a large organization — who loses access to resources, and through what mechanism — is left implicit.
Read next: Cutler on power and space (TBM 413, recently in user's library); Pfeffer on power in organizations; Helmer/Porter for the strategic value of being explicit about who-loses-what.