What the research says about coordination and documented process
Donald Sull and Rebecca Homkes’s research on strategy execution, based on a multi-year study of more than 250 companies and several thousand managers, found that the central execution problem most organisations face is cross-unit coordination rather than vertical alignment — only 9% of managers in their sample said they could rely on colleagues in other functions and units all of the time. Jay Galbraith’s information-processing view of organisation design explains why this problem intensifies with scale and geographic reach: rising task uncertainty demands rising information-processing capacity, met through self-contained units, formal reporting systems, or lateral coordination mechanisms.
Erik Hollnagel, Robert Wears and Jeffrey Braithwaite’s research on the distinction between “work-as-imagined” and “work-as-done” adds a dimension that is especially relevant to operational excellence claims specifically. Their argument, developed across safety-critical domains, is that formally documented process and actual daily practice routinely diverge — not because people are careless, but because, in their words, “things go well because people make sensible adjustments according to the demands of the situation,” not because they simply follow the procedure as written. An organisation that equates operational excellence with the existence of well-documented process is measuring the wrong thing if it has not also examined how closely actual practice tracks that documentation.
Nelson Repenning and John Sterman’s research on the “capability trap” completes the picture: organisations under sustained pressure default to working harder rather than working smarter, and the people who successfully prevent problems receive no visible credit for the problems that never happened — a dynamic that systematically biases operational attention toward visible firefighting over the less visible discipline that genuine operational excellence actually requires.
These four bodies of research converge on a specific and somewhat uncomfortable conclusion for any organisation that has invested heavily in operational documentation: the investment is necessary but not, on its own, sufficient. Galbraith’s argument establishes that formal coordination capacity is genuinely needed as complexity rises. Sull and Homkes establish that most organisations’ actual execution gap sits in cross-unit coordination specifically, not in the existence of stated strategy or process. Hollnagel, Wears and Braithwaite establish that the documented version of a process and the lived version of it are rarely identical. Repenning and Sterman establish that, under pressure, organisations systematically under-invest in exactly the feedback and verification work that would reveal the gap between the two. None of the four claims documentation is the wrong investment — together, they suggest it is an incomplete one without a working feedback loop to actual practice.
Why Singapore’s regional-hub role intensifies the pattern
Singapore’s position as a common Asia Pacific regional headquarters location — chosen by a large number of multinational and regional organisations for exactly this role — means that “operational excellence” in a Singapore-based function frequently has to be defined and delivered across a wider geography than the local office’s own headcount would suggest. A regional operations, finance, or customer-success function based in Singapore is often coordinating standards, decisions and information flow across multiple Asia Pacific markets, each with distinct regulatory environments, languages, and time zones spanning roughly the full breadth of the region.
This raises Galbraith’s information-processing demand substantially, and it raises the stakes of the Hollnagel, Wears and Braithwaite finding specifically. A regional standard operating procedure written in Singapore and applied across, for example, markets in North Asia, Southeast Asia and Australia is especially likely to diverge from actual local practice, because the people writing the documented process are, by the nature of a hub structure, often at some organisational and geographic distance from the people executing it day to day. Genuine operational excellence in this structure depends on functioning feedback from local execution back to the regional standard — which is precisely the kind of coordination Sull and Homkes found is where most organisations’ real execution problem sits.
Singapore’s own domestic operating environment — a small, high-cost, land-constrained economy with a demonstrably efficient regulatory and logistics infrastructure — sets a high local baseline for process discipline, which is one reason the gap between documented regional standards and actual practice elsewhere in the region can be easy to underestimate from a Singapore vantage point specifically.
This has a specific consequence for how regional standards get built in the first place. A standard operating procedure drafted in Singapore, by people operating inside Singapore’s own high-discipline domestic environment, tends to reflect the assumptions of that environment — reliable infrastructure, consistent regulatory enforcement, a workforce accustomed to a particular level of process adherence — even when the standard is written for a much more varied set of markets. The document is not wrong, exactly, but it is calibrated to conditions that may not hold in every market it is meant to govern, which is a specific and easy-to-miss version of the work-as-imagined gap Hollnagel, Wears and Braithwaite describe.
Where it varies, and what it doesn’t explain
The pattern is most visible in functions that are explicitly structured as regional hubs — shared services, regional finance, regional customer operations — and less visible in functions that are genuinely local to Singapore’s own domestic market, where the coordination distance between documentation and practice is much shorter. It is also more acute the more linguistically and regulatorily diverse the markets under the hub’s remit are; a hub covering culturally and regulatorily similar markets faces a smaller version of the same gap than one covering the full breadth of Asia Pacific.
What the research does not establish is that documentation itself is the problem, or that less process would produce better outcomes. Hollnagel, Wears and Braithwaite’s argument is not against documented process — it is against treating the existence of documentation as evidence that it is being followed, or being followed appropriately, without checking. The evidence explains why a Singapore regional hub’s operational excellence claims need to be tested against actual practice in the markets it serves, not assumed from the quality of its own documentation.
A consequence worth naming directly for hub-structured organisations specifically: the gap between documented and actual practice tends to be widest exactly where the stakes of the gap are highest — the most distant, most linguistically different markets in the regional remit — because those are also the markets where a regional standard-setter in Singapore has the least direct visibility into daily execution. This produces a form of risk that is inversely correlated with visibility: the markets least well understood from the hub are frequently also the markets where documented and actual practice have diverged the most, which is precisely the combination that makes a genuine operational failure hardest to see coming from a Singapore vantage point.
The compounding version of this risk shows up at moments of genuine stress — a regulatory audit, a service disruption, a client escalation — precisely when the organisation most needs its documented process and its actual practice to match. An organisation that has never tested the gap between the two under normal conditions typically discovers the size of that gap for the first time under exactly the conditions where discovering it is most costly, which is the specific failure mode the Hollnagel, Wears and Braithwaite research was developed to help organisations anticipate rather than encounter for the first time in a crisis.
Where this shows up
This perspective is read through the Singapore setting. The Singapore market page brings together the related Perspectives, and the Markets page places Singapore alongside the other business hubs.
Questions worth considering
- Is there a functioning feedback channel from local execution in each market back to the regional standard, or does the standard only flow outward from Singapore?
- Where is the organisation’s confidence in its operational excellence based on the quality of its documented process rather than evidence of how closely local practice tracks it?
- Is current attention biased toward visible operational firefighting in a way that leaves the less visible discipline of genuine prevention under-resourced?
- Were the organisation’s regional standards drafted with Singapore’s own high-discipline domestic conditions as an implicit baseline, and has that assumption ever been tested against the markets furthest from it?
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