The Finding
The MIT Sloan-led study by Donald Sull, together with Rebecca Homkes of London Business School and the LSE Centre for Economic Performance, surveyed more than 250 companies and several thousand managers on strategy execution failure. Its central conclusion, stated plainly by the researchers, was that the primary execution problem in most organisations is cross-unit coordination rather than vertical alignment — the mechanisms connecting strategic intent down through the organisation generally work; what fails is the lateral connection between functions and units operating alongside each other. The supporting figure was stark: only 9% of managers surveyed said they could rely on colleagues in other functions and units all of the time.
What It Means in Practice
Operational problems are frequently diagnosed, first, as process problems — the process itself is unclear, poorly designed, or not being followed. This diagnosis is sometimes correct. The Sull, Homkes and Sull finding suggests it is very often incomplete, because many things that present as process failures are, on closer inspection, communication failures occurring at precisely the cross-unit boundaries their research identifies as the weakest point in most organisations.
A process that spans more than one team or function depends, at every point it crosses a boundary, on accurate communication between the two sides about what has happened, what is needed next, and what “correct” looks like at that specific handover. When that communication is reliable, the process tends to run smoothly regardless of how elegantly or roughly it is documented. When it is not, even a well-designed, clearly documented process will produce recurring friction at exactly the points where it crosses from one team to another — friction that gets attributed to the process itself, because the process is what is visible, while the communication failure underlying it is not.
This reframing matters because it points toward a different place to look when an operational problem recurs. A process redesign addresses the documented steps. It does not necessarily address whether the people on either side of a cross-functional boundary actually share an accurate, current understanding of what the other side needs — which, per the research, is the more consistently unreliable link in the chain. An organisation can redesign the same process multiple times without resolving a recurring problem, if the actual failure point is the communication across a specific organisational boundary rather than the steps of the process itself.
There is a further consequence worth tracing through here. Because each process redesign is a visible, resource-intensive undertaking, an organisation that repeatedly redesigns the same process without resolving the underlying problem can, over time, develop a quiet institutional fatigue around that specific process — a sense that “we’ve tried everything” and the problem is simply intractable. This conclusion is usually premature. What has actually been tried, in most such cases, is a series of variations on the same category of fix — changes to documented steps — while the category the research points to as more consistently at fault — cross-functional communication reliability — has never actually been addressed directly, because it was never diagnosed as the cause in the first place.
Where It Varies
By how many functions a process crosses. Processes contained within a single function are less exposed to this dynamic than processes spanning several, because each additional function crossed is another instance of the cross-unit reliance the research identifies as unreliable.
By organisational history. Recently merged, restructured, or newly formed cross-functional relationships tend to show this pattern more acutely, since the informal trust that can partially compensate for structural coordination gaps has not yet developed.
By how problems get routed for investigation. Organisations that default to routing operational problems to whichever team owns the visible process step, rather than examining the cross-functional boundary the problem sits closest to, are more likely to misdiagnose a communication failure as a process failure repeatedly.
By the visibility of the communication itself. Communication that happens through informal, undocumented channels is much harder to audit for reliability than communication built into a formal process step, which is part of why the underlying cause is so often missed.
A related pattern is worth naming for completeness: the Sull, Homkes and Sull research also found that vertical alignment — the connection between strategy and individual teams — generally does work, which sharpens rather than softens the implication here. If the vertical mechanisms are sound, a recurring operational problem is statistically less likely to originate there, and more likely to sit at exactly the lateral boundary the research identifies as weak — a further reason to look sideways, between functions, before looking further up or down the same chain of command.
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Questions worth considering
- When an operational problem has recurred despite being “fixed” through process changes, has the process actually changed, or has the communication across its cross-functional boundaries?
- How many distinct functions does the organisation’s most problematic process actually cross?
- Where would the Sull, Homkes and Sull finding — that cross-unit reliance is unreliable for the large majority of managers — be most likely to apply inside this specific organisation?
More on this topic: Operations.
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