The Situation
The Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources engaged ZXM to diagnose why the CIO’s executive group was not getting a clear picture of what value the division was actually delivering. The division had multiple branches, each led by a General Manager, each reporting separately in a weekly meeting that ran for four hours.
The reports were detailed and individually coherent. The problem was structural: each GM reported on their own branch in isolation, which produced no visibility of cross-branch dependencies, no line of sight from activities to outcomes, and no basis for the CIO to make informed decisions about where to direct effort across the whole division.
The meeting format reinforced the problem. Four hours of branch-by-branch reporting produced no shared view of enterprise value — only a longer queue of activity updates. The CIO could not determine from these reports which outcomes required attention, which dependencies were creating risk, or where resource decisions needed to be made.
What the diagnostic found
Before any changes were made to the meeting, ZXM mapped the existing reporting structure to locate the constraint. The finding was direct: the meeting format was organised around organisational units, not value. Executives could only report on what their branch had done — not what the division had achieved together.
Three structural conditions sustained the problem. There was no shared ranking of outcomes, so no common basis for directing the conversation. Reporting was deliverable-focused, which kept attention on activity rather than impact. And there was no mechanism to surface cross-branch dependencies, so risks that spanned multiple branches remained invisible to the group as a whole.
What changed
ZXM shifted the frame of the meeting from branch outputs to division outcomes. An outcome wall was established outside the CIO’s office to anchor each session. Executives agreed on a ranking method tied to enterprise value, giving the CIO a basis for directing attention in real time rather than receiving equal-weight updates from each branch.
The meeting was redesigned around three operating rules: discuss outcomes, not deliverables; bring in anyone from across the division contributing to an outcome’s delivery; and call out conversations that run too deep, parking them for a follow-on with the relevant people. The time box was set at 30 minutes and held from the first session.
What held
The executive meeting dropped from four hours to 30 minutes. That figure held — it was not a one-off compression but a structural change in how the division ran its governance. The COO subsequently began attending the session, not because it was mandated but because the format had become the most efficient point of access to a whole-of-division view of value delivery.
For the first time, the organisation had visibility of work across all branches simultaneously. Dependencies that had previously been invisible — and unmanaged — became part of the standing agenda. Executives were making resource and priority decisions from a shared picture of what the division was delivering, not from a collection of individual branch reports. The constraint had not been the executives. It had been a meeting format that could only ever produce siloed information.
30-minute executive meetings
The weekly CIO governance session dropped from four hours to 30 minutes and held — a structural change in operating rhythm, not a one-off compression.
Cross-division visibility
Dependencies across branches became visible and part of the standing agenda — the first time the organisation had a whole-of-division view of work in progress.
Value-ranked decisions
Executives ranked outcomes by enterprise value and made resource decisions from a shared picture of what mattered — not from competing branch reports.
