The symptom
Consider an organisation that rolls out a new procedure across its network — new point-of-sale software, a revised service sequence, an updated product line. A year later, most sites have adopted it fully. A handful have not. All received the same training and the same materials; the rollout, judged by input, was complete and even.
The instinctive read is a follow-up failure — someone should have chased the stragglers harder, sooner. That explanation runs into a problem once the non-adopting sites are looked at together rather than individually: they are not random. They share a characteristic. Each is run by a long-tenured manager who was in post during a previous rollout that the organisation itself abandoned partway through.
What is really being tested
This is not simply resistance to change, and treating it that way misreads what is happening. The managers who did not adopt the new procedure are applying a reasonable prior, based on direct, personal experience of how this organisation’s initiatives have historically played out. If a previous rollout was announced with the same confidence, backed by the same training investment, and then quietly stopped mid-implementation, a manager who lived through that has genuine evidence — better evidence than head office has about itself — for treating a new announcement as provisional until it proves otherwise.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull’s multi-year study of more than 250 companies, published in Harvard Business Review, found that the central execution problem in most organisations is not unclear direction from the top — alignment processes, in their research, were generally sound — but cross-unit coordination: only 9% of managers said they could rely on colleagues in other functions and units all of the time to deliver what was expected. Applied to a franchise network, this reframes the non-adopting sites’ behaviour. They are not failing to understand the instruction. They are making a coordination judgement about whether the rest of the organisation will actually follow through on its own rollout, based on the only evidence available to them — its own track record.
Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat’s research on the barriers to strategy implementation, published in Sloan Management Review, identifies inconsistent follow-through and poor vertical communication among the recurring, mutually reinforcing obstacles that block execution — often, they note, invisibly to the leadership team that set the direction in the first place. A rollout that was abandoned without a clear, communicated reason does not register at head office as a live factor in the current initiative. It registers, at the affected sites, as exactly that.
Where the gap concentrates, and why
The franchise structure makes this dynamic sharper than it would be in a company-owned chain, for a specific reason: franchisees carry personal capital risk in a way employed site managers do not. An employed manager who is sceptical of a rollout still has limited discretion to simply decline it. A franchisee, whose own money is invested in the site’s operation, has a stronger independent basis — and, within the bounds of the franchise agreement, often more practical latitude — to make their own judgement about whether adopting a given change is worth the disruption, particularly if their prior experience suggests the change may not last.
This means the execution gap in a franchise network tends to concentrate specifically among the most experienced, longest-tenured operators — not the newest or least capable ones, which is where a training-failure explanation would predict it should appear. Long tenure means more accumulated exposure to the organisation’s own history of follow-through, for better or worse. A network with a strong record of completing what it starts will find its longest-tenured franchisees among its most reliable adopters, because their prior experience confirms that new initiatives tend to stick. A network with a patchier record will find the same tenure working against it.
Jeffrey Bradach’s research on chains combining company-owned and franchised units found that these networks manage the tension between central direction and local operating judgement through multiple mechanisms working together — not through instruction alone. Rollout adoption is one visible test of whether those mechanisms are actually aligned, because it asks franchisees to act on central direction with their own capital, based on their own read of whether that direction is likely to hold.
There is a common misconception worth addressing directly here: that a franchisor can close this gap simply by communicating more — more frequent updates, more visible enthusiasm, more reminders that the change matters. Sull, Homkes and Sull’s research is explicit that alignment on direction is rarely the bottleneck; most organisations they studied were already good at communicating what mattered from the top down. What their data pointed to instead was the horizontal problem — whether one part of the organisation could rely on another to actually deliver, which no amount of top-down messaging resolves on its own. A franchisee weighing whether to adopt a rollout is not asking “did head office explain this clearly.” They are asking “will this still be the plan in six months,” and that question is answered by the organisation’s history, not its current messaging.
This also explains why the gap tends to be sticky once it forms. A single abandoned rollout creates a data point that colours how the next several initiatives are received, regardless of whether the next initiative is better planned or more urgently needed. Reversing that requires the organisation to build a new track record of follow-through, visibly, over more than one cycle — an outcome that cannot be communicated into existence, only demonstrated.
Where this shows up
The pattern described here is most recognisable in franchise networks, part of the wider Multi-Site and Franchise grouping. The same organisational questions appear, under different names, in other sectors.
Questions worth considering
- When a rollout stalls at specific sites, is the pattern examined for what those sites have in common, or treated as isolated cases of non-compliance?
- What is the organisation’s actual track record on completing what it announces — and would long-tenured operators describe it the same way head office would?
- Does the network distinguish between a franchisee who has not understood a change and one who has made a considered judgement not to adopt it yet?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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