The finding
Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat’s research, published in what is now MIT Sloan Management Review, examined why strategy implementation and organisational learning fail — and identified a set of mutually reinforcing barriers they called the “silent killers,” each one making the others harder to address. Their most striking conclusion wasn’t about any single barrier, though. It was about what it takes to actually address one: “Without transforming that barrier into a capability,” they wrote, “none of the other barriers can be turned into capabilities either.” Addressing one implementation barrier in isolation, in other words, tends not to hold, because the barriers reinforce each other closely enough that progress on one alone is fragile against the others still standing.
What it means in practice
This has a direct implication for what sustains execution over the long run, as distinct from what gets it started. Launching a strategic initiative is, in most organisations, a single, visible, well-resourced act — a kickoff, a sponsor, an initial wave of attention. Sustaining it is a different kind of activity entirely: less visible, rarely celebrated, and easy to quietly deprioritise once the initial launch attention has moved on to the next thing. Beer and Eisenstat’s finding suggests why sustaining matters as much as launching — because the barriers that erode execution over time don’t go away simply because an initiative launched well; they reassert themselves continuously, and holding them off is an ongoing act rather than something completed at the outset.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull’s separate research, based on more than 250 companies and published in Harvard Business Review, reinforces this from a different angle: their finding that only 9% of managers could reliably rely on cross-functional colleagues all of the time describes a condition that doesn’t resolve itself once and stay resolved — lateral coordination has to be actively maintained, because the structural conditions that make it hard don’t disappear after a successful quarter.
Both findings point toward the same practical implication: whatever made an initiative’s early coordination work well — the relationships, the shared urgency, the direct attention from sponsors — was itself a temporary condition, not a permanent fix. Assuming that early success was self-sustaining, rather than actively maintained, is a natural but costly mistake, because nothing in either barrier’s underlying mechanics changes simply because the initiative had a strong first few months.
Where this varies
What separates organisations where execution holds up over years from those where an initially strong start fades is less visible than either the launch or the eventual outcome — it’s largely made up of what happens in between, in the unglamorous middle period after the initial enthusiasm has worn off and before results are yet fully evident. This is precisely the period where, per Beer and Eisenstat’s research, mutually reinforcing barriers have the most room to quietly re-establish themselves, because attention has naturally moved elsewhere and nothing is specifically counteracting that drift.
It’s worth being honest about what the research does and doesn’t establish here. It’s well supported that sustained execution requires ongoing attention rather than a single well-executed launch, and that implementation barriers reinforce each other in ways that make addressing them individually fragile. It says considerably less about the specific mechanics of how any particular organisation should structure that ongoing attention — that depends heavily on context, and no single formula would generalise cleanly across different organisations and situations.
This middle period is also where an organisation’s account of its own history tends to get simplified in ways that obscure what actually happened. Initiatives that sustained well are often remembered, in hindsight, as having succeeded because the original plan was good — which understates how much of the outcome depended on attention that continued long after the plan itself was finalised. Initiatives that faded are often remembered as having had the wrong plan, when the plan may have been entirely sound and simply stopped receiving the ongoing attention it needed once something newer arrived.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- For a strategic initiative that launched well, what has actually happened to the attention it received since — has it been sustained, or has it followed the more common pattern of gradually thinning as newer priorities arrived?
- Are any of the implementation barriers the organisation has previously addressed showing early signs of reasserting themselves, now that the initial focus has moved elsewhere?
- Is there any deliberate mechanism for noticing this kind of quiet erosion, or does it currently depend on someone happening to notice?
More on this topic: Strategy Execution.
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