This article was originally published on Maastricht University’s website and was created in collaboration with Maastricht University School of Business and Economics.
In an era defined by artificial intelligence, natural stupidity, accelerating change, and geopolitical uncertainty, strategy is often framed as a technical exercise: data-driven, efficiency-focused, and relentlessly forward-looking. Yet according to Edward Huizenga, this framing misses the point.
“Business is really about humans,” he says. “AI matters, of course. But the anchor of organisations and good strategy is human behaviour.”
Edward Huizenga, Professor of Strategy, Innovation and Change and Business Practice Chair at UMIO, the executive branch of Maastricht University School of Business and Economics, has built his career at a place many leaders rarely occupy comfortably: the intersection of academic rigour and corporate reality. It is precisely this intersection, he argues, that explains why so many strategies look convincing on paper but fail in practice.
From theory to practice: where strategy becomes human
Huizenga feels most at home where theory meets action. Alongside his academic role, he is a partner at Benthurst Consulting, advising organisations on purpose-led strategy, behaviour change, and transformation. Rather than seeing academia and consulting as competing worlds, he views their tension as productive.
“Business brings urgency and relevance,” he explains. “Academia brings evidence and the courage to challenge assumptions.”
The two roles constantly test each other. Consulting exposes him to the immediate pressures leaders face: slow decision-making, efficiency targets, quarterly expectations, and organisational politics. Academia, by contrast, provides space to question whether prevailing leadership models still make sense. In Huizenga’s view, universities should act as a counter voice to business.
This balance has shaped his work since becoming Business Practice Chair at UMIO in 2020. Deep involvement in executive education and MBA programmes, he says, has sharpened his understanding of what truly needs to happen inside organisations today. “The holy grail,” he adds, “is putting education right into the middle of that reality, and letting it spark new energy.”
The behavioural blind spot in strategy
Across industries, the numbers are sobering: roughly 70% of strategies and transformations fail to achieve their intended objectives. For Huizenga, the explanation is rarely a lack of intelligence or ambition.
“Organisations invest enormous amounts of money in strategy,” he notes. “But they systematically underestimate the behavioural side of execution.”
Leadership teams design compelling visions, yet struggle with decision overload, unclear accountability, and cultural friction. Meetings multiply, projects accumulate, and decisions drift upward, or stall entirely. While Peter Drucker’s famous line “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is often repeated, Huizenga prefers to make culture concrete rather than abstract.
In his work, long-term success depends on three tightly connected elements:
- Purpose embedded in strategy, not added as a communications afterthought
- Decision clarity, so people know who decides what, and are allowed to decide
- Mindset and behaviour change, enabling execution to actually happen
Without these foundations, even the most elegant strategies remain glossy documents rather than lived realities.
Decision-making: the human core of execution
One of Huizenga’s most distinctive contributions lies in decision governance. Drawing on academic decision psychology and years of consulting experience, he noticed a recurring paradox: organisations are full of decision frameworks: flowcharts, milestones, growth models, yet no one really uses them.
“There was a lot of process,” he recalls, “but very little ownership.”
Inspired by insights from behavioural science and scholars such as Daniel Kahneman, Huizenga began focusing on noise in organisations: overlapping responsibilities, excessive consultation, and the psychological hesitation to take responsibility. The result was a practical decision governance model DRIVE designed to cut through complexity.Clear decision mandates reduce meetings, accelerate execution, and restore accountability. Just as importantly, they change how people feel at work.
“When decision clarity improves,” Huizenga says, “people don’t just move faster. They feel trusted.”
The simplicity of these models is intentional. “It’s brutal simplicity,” he admits. “And it works.” Case examples of large European multinationals show that fewer rules, clearly applied, often outperform sophisticated systems no one believes in.
Purpose only works when people can act on it
Huizenga is equally critical of what he calls purpose washing: powerful statements that never shape real decisions. While purpose has become fashionable in corporate communication, its strategic role is often misunderstood.
“Don’t put purpose into people,” he argues. “Gather people around a purpose.”
When purpose is embedded in strategy, it acts as a compass. It clarifies where to play, what to prioritise, and which trade-offs to accept. Research into so-called Level 5 strategy shows that organisations capable of aligning purpose and performance over long periods outperform peers financially, by as much as 9%, while also creating societal value.
Companies such as DSM-Firmenich and Roche illustrate this balance. With long-term transition horizons and the courage to resist short-term pressure, they demonstrate that doing good and doing well need not be opposites. Similar commitments can be seen in organisations like Ørsted, which deliberately shifted its portfolio to wind and solar energy, and Unilever, whose sustainability ambitions continue to test traditional shareholder expectations.
Such strategies require courage. Leaders must hold course during short-term volatility and accept that not every meaningful investment pays off immediately.
Strategy as a learning journey
Another recurring theme in Huizenga’s thinking is that strategy should not be treated as a periodic planning ritual, but as a capability learning process. Traditional multi-year plans often create alignment on paper, yet little change in behaviour.
Instead, Huizenga advocates what he calls strategy as training: developing leaders while they shape strategic direction. This includes working explicitly with behavioural dynamics – cognitive bias, fear of loss, change fatigue, and resistance – drawing on psychology and behavioural economics.
“Most leaders were never trained to understand how people actually behave,” he says. “Yet that’s what they deal with every day.”
At UMIO, these insights are translated into executive programmes, where decision-making, leadership dilemmas, and behavioural awareness are trained using real business cases. Personality models, including the Big Five traits, help leaders better understand themselves and their teams. Not as an abstract exercise, but as a strategic necessity.
Educating the next generation of leaders
For Huizenga, this shift has major implications for business education. Traditional knowledge transfer is no longer sufficient. What leaders increasingly need are skills: purpose-based decision-making, psychological safety, courageous leadership, and the ability to act clearly amid uncertainty.
UMIO’s executive and MBA programmes have evolved accordingly, incorporating behavioural science, sustainability, and consumer psychology. This evolution reflects a broader movement across leading institutions, from INSEAD to Harvard to globally ranked executive programmes, recognising that the finesse of soft skills is now central to strategic leadership.
“The next generation of leaders,” Huizenga notes, “will be judged less on how much they know, and more on how clearly they decide, and how humanely they lead.”
Looking ahead
At the recent book launch of his recent book “Change For Good: Strategy For The Better”, Huizenga joined several executives in a debate around a simple but unsettling question: what will we regret in ten years if we fail to act now?
The answer, he believes, lies at the intersection of purpose and psychology.
As organisations navigate AI-driven change, sustainability pressures, and ongoing geopolitical instability, leadership will be defined less by control and optimisation, and more by storytelling, belief systems, and social cohesion.
“Decisions won’t get easier,” Huizenga reflects. “But purpose can make them clearer.”
For leaders willing to move beyond efficiency alone and engage seriously with the human side of strategy, the reward is not only stronger performance, but organisations that people actually want to be part of.
