The symptom
Consider an organisation where a project milestone slips by two weeks. Then, a few months later, by another two. Over roughly five months, in small increments, it has moved by eleven weeks from where it started. Nobody ever made an eleven-week decision. Each individual slip — two weeks here, ten days there — was raised, explained, and accepted by whoever needed to sign off on it at the time.
This is a small, ordinary example of a much larger pattern: the strategic plan set a direction, and the accumulated weight of individually reasonable daily decisions has quietly taken the organisation somewhere else. Nobody chose that outcome. It assembled itself out of choices nobody was tracking in aggregate.
The same shape recurs well beyond timelines. Budgets drift the same way — a slightly higher spend here, a reasonable overrun there, none of it individually alarming. Scope drifts the same way — a feature added, a requirement quietly dropped, each change agreed on its own merits. In every version, the mechanism is identical: decisions small enough to escape scrutiny, repeated often enough to add up to something that would never have been approved if proposed all at once.
What leaders usually conclude
The instinctive read is poor project management — someone should have been watching the timeline more closely, and if they had, this wouldn’t have happened. It’s a tidy explanation because it locates the problem in a specific role rather than in how the organisation as a whole makes small decisions.
It’s also an explanation that doesn’t survive close examination of the scenario. The project manager in question was, by any reasonable standard, doing their job — flagging each slip as it arose, getting the appropriate sign-off, keeping a clean record of what changed and when. The gap wasn’t in their vigilance about individual changes. It was in the absence of anyone whose job included stepping back periodically and comparing the current state of the plan to where it started, rather than only to where it was last time it was checked.
It’s also usually not quite right. Every one of those two-week slips was, on its own terms, a reasonable call, made with visibility and consent from whoever was accountable at that moment. The failure, if there was one, wasn’t in any single decision. It was in the absence of anything that aggregated those decisions and asked what they added up to. A project manager watching week-to-week has no natural trigger to step back and notice an eleven-week drift assembled from pieces too small to individually alarm anyone.
What the evidence suggests
This connects to a finding from Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull’s research in Harvard Business Review, which examined more than 250 companies and found that the central obstacle to execution was typically lateral coordination — decisions and dependencies crossing between units — rather than a breakdown in how strategy cascaded downward. A milestone drifting by increments is a coordination failure of exactly this shape: each individual slip is agreed between two parties who are coordinating perfectly well with each other. What’s missing is any mechanism sitting above those individual conversations that would notice the pattern across all of them.
No single person in this picture is positioned to see the whole. Each pair of colleagues coordinating a given slip can only see their own conversation, not the three or four other conversations elsewhere in the organisation that are quietly moving other pieces of the same plan by similarly small amounts. The drift is visible only in aggregate, and aggregate visibility is precisely what nobody in the day-to-day conversations has any natural reason to hold.
The deeper mechanism is a threshold problem. Most organisations have some version of scrutiny that kicks in when a change is large enough — a milestone moving by two months in one decision would likely trigger a conversation nobody wants to have. A milestone moving by two weeks, four separate times, triggers that conversation zero times, because no single instance crosses the threshold that would summon attention. The plan drifts precisely by staying, at every individual step, below the level that would get it questioned.
It’s worth being honest that not every slipped deadline reflects this pattern. Some genuinely reflect changed circumstances that warranted each individual adjustment, and treating every delay as evidence of drift would be its own kind of overreach. The distinguishing question is less about any single slip and more about whether anything in the organisation would ever notice the cumulative total.
This pattern tends to be more pronounced on longer-running initiatives, simply because there are more opportunities for small, individually reasonable adjustments to accumulate before anyone naturally steps back and compares the current state to the original plan. A six-week project has little room for this kind of drift to develop unnoticed; an eighteen-month strategic initiative has considerably more, and correspondingly less natural occasion for anyone to look at the whole arc rather than the latest update.
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Questions worth considering
- How does an organisation notice a change that never happens all at once?
- Is there anything that tracks cumulative drift on strategically important milestones, separate from whatever tracks each individual change request?
- Where a plan has moved gradually from its original shape, would leadership currently know — or would they only find out the way most organisations do, well after the fact?
More on this topic: Strategy Execution.
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