An op-ed by Élodie Barlow (Director of o3) on the challenges of coherence, credibility, and territorial anchoring, published in Cadre & Dirigeant.

In recent months, the same pattern has been repeating across many industrial projects. Technically strong companies are discovering, often too late, that the quality of their solution is no longer enough to secure a project’s trajectory. What these situations have in common is simple: projects are not challenged for their industrial relevance, but for their local readability. And when catch-up efforts do occur, they always cost more than anticipation.

In a context marked by reindustrialization, energy transition, and growing pressure on skills, a project’s success is no longer determined solely in engineering offices or investment committees. It also depends on how a company embeds itself within its local territory.
The territory is no longer just a host location. It has become a condition for success.

Local expectations have fundamentally changed

For a long time, industrial projects were designed within a centralized logic: decisions made at headquarters, then explained locally once the project was underway. This model is becoming less and less effective. Today, in many economic areas, the ability to deploy a project depends on very concrete factors: a deep understanding of the local labor market, strong connections with training and education stakeholders, and a visible contribution to the territory’s economic dynamics.
Territories no longer expect only investments. They expect partners.

A persistent mistake at executive level

Despite this shift, many companies still treat the territory as a secondary issue. It is often delegated to communication or institutional relations functions, whereas it should be part of strategic project governance.

Because informing is not enough to create anchoring. Multiplying communications does not compensate for a presence perceived as disconnected from local realities. Companies work on the narrative of the project without always securing what makes it credible locally.

Very real economic consequences

When this alignment is not addressed upfront, the effects are immediate: project delays, recruitment difficulties, and operational tensions. In several industrial regions facing shortages of technical skills, a company’s ability to attract talent now depends as much on its local reputation as on its salary levels.

These costs rarely appear as such in dashboards. Yet, in sectors where investment cycles span years, they directly impact performance. Conversely, companies that structure their territorial strategy early benefit from an advantage that dashboards often fail to capture: better local anticipation, easier access to skills, and faster project deployment.

Putting the territory back at the right level

Taking territorial anchoring seriously requires a shift in perspective. The territory can no longer be seen as a simple implementation step or a matter of communication. It must be integrated from the outset into project design: in investment decisions, employment policies, and local partnerships. Communication plays a key role here—not to compensate afterwards, but to make an already coherent trajectory understandable.

As execution constraints intensify, the territory is becoming a true test of credibility for companies. Those that continue to treat it as a matter of image often realize too late that it was first and foremost a matter of execution.