The Planning-Quality Position
The intuitive account has real evidentiary support. A widely repeated figure — that around 70% of strategies fail to achieve their intended outcomes — has circulated for decades and is frequently attributed to planning failures: unclear objectives, unrealistic assumptions, insufficient buy-in secured before launch. The instinct behind this position is not baseless. Poorly specified strategy genuinely does produce worse outcomes than well-specified strategy, and organisations that skip rigorous strategic planning in favour of instinct do measurably worse on average than those that do not.
The difficulty with this position is that its most commonly cited evidence does not hold up under direct examination. Mark Hughes, examining the 70% failure-rate claim specifically, traced it back through five separate published instances and found no valid or reliable empirical evidence supporting any of them. The figure’s earliest traceable origin lies in a 1993 business book that its own authors explicitly labelled an “unscientific estimate” — a characterisation one of those authors later publicly walked back from having been taken seriously at all. When McKinsey conducted its own survey of more than 1,500 executives on change-programme outcomes, roughly 30% reported their programmes as completely or mostly successful, and only around 10% as unsuccessful — a result nowhere close to a 70% failure rate. The planning-quality position, in other words, is frequently defended using evidence that does not actually exist in the form it is cited.
The Coordination Position
A separate, more recent body of research locates the failure point after planning, not within it. Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull’s multi-year study of more than 250 companies and several thousand managers — examining organisations where planning had already happened — found that vertical alignment, the process connecting a strategy to the people expected to execute it, was generally sound. The persistent problem was horizontal: cross-unit coordination, where only 9% of managers reported being able to rely on colleagues in other functions all of the time. On this account, well-specified strategies fail constantly, not because the strategy was wrong, but because the organisation executing it was never structurally equipped to coordinate across the functions the strategy required.
This position has its own supporting evidence beyond the Sull et al. finding. Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat’s research into why senior teams fail to surface implementation problems identified a cluster of structural barriers — unclear strategy sitting alongside genuinely conflicting priorities, weak vertical communication, inconsistent senior management style — that block execution regardless of how well the original plan was specified. Their central argument is that these barriers are self-reinforcing: an organisation cannot address any of them individually without first addressing the deeper barrier that prevents the senior team from discussing implementation failure openly in the first place.
Why the Disagreement Persists
The disagreement survives, in part, because both positions are examining genuinely different failure points and calling the result by the same name. A strategy can be well-specified and still fail to execute, which the coordination-focused research explains well and the planning-quality position struggles to account for. A strategy can also be genuinely poorly specified — vague, internally contradictory, built on unexamined assumptions — in which case no amount of cross-functional coordination will rescue it, which the planning-quality intuition correctly captures even where its most commonly cited statistic does not survive scrutiny.
Part of the persistence is also methodological. The planning-quality position is largely defended through repetition of a figure that traces back to an admitted estimate rather than through direct empirical study of where, specifically, execution breaks down. The coordination position rests on more rigorous underlying research — large-sample studies with defined methodology — but examines a narrower slice of the execution problem: organisations where a strategy already existed and coordination was the variable under study, which says less about organisations whose strategy itself was the primary defect.
Neither position has been tested against the other directly, in a single study designed to separate planning quality from coordination capacity as independent variables and measure which one predicts execution outcomes more strongly. That comparative study, as far as the published research shows, does not yet exist. The disagreement is not a failure of either camp to look hard enough; it is a genuine gap in what has been studied.
There is also a less comfortable possibility worth naming: that the two positions are not actually competing explanations of the same phenomenon but descriptions of two different phenomena that get labelled “strategy execution failure” indiscriminately. An ambiguous plan and a well-specified plan undermined by poor cross-unit coordination can look identical from the outside — both produce the same visible symptom of activity without results — while requiring entirely different diagnosis and entirely different responses. If that is closer to the truth, the persistence of the debate is not really a disagreement to be resolved at all, but a sign that “strategy execution” is being asked to do too much conceptual work as a single category.
What It Means for a Growing London Business
For a growing organisation, the practical stakes of this disagreement are real, because the two positions point toward different diagnostic questions when execution visibly stalls.
If the planning-quality position is closer to correct in a given case, the useful question is whether the strategy itself was specific enough to act on — whether priorities were genuinely ranked rather than listed, whether trade-offs were made explicit, whether the plan survived contact with the people who would have to execute it before it was finalised. If the coordination position is closer to correct, the useful question is entirely different: whether the functions expected to jointly deliver the strategy actually have working mechanisms for coordinating with each other, independent of how clearly the strategy itself was written.
London’s density arguably raises the stakes of getting this diagnosis right rather than resolving which position is generally true. A market where specialisation happens early and functions fragment quickly — a pattern examined in more depth elsewhere on leadership alignment across London specifically — is exactly the environment in which the coordination explanation becomes more plausible, because the organisational conditions for cross-unit coordination failure exist earlier and more intensely than in a market where organisations grow more slowly and stay less specialised for longer. That is not evidence that coordination is always the answer. It is a reason for a growing London organisation, specifically, not to assume the planning-quality diagnosis by default, given how quickly the coordination conditions the alternative account describes tend to appear here.
Where this shows up
The questions here are set in London. More Perspectives for this market are on the London page, and the Markets index shows the other business hubs.
Questions worth considering
- When a strategy stalls, has anyone actually tested whether the plan itself was ambiguous, or has that been assumed because it is the more familiar explanation?
- Separately, has anyone measured how reliably different functions actually coordinate with each other day to day, rather than inferring it from whether the top team agrees on the plan?
- Given that the honest answer may be genuinely unclear, what would distinguishing the two explanations actually require finding out?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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