The symptom
The pattern is familiar to most leadership teams that have sat through a strategy cycle more than once. The plan is approved. It is communicated — a town hall, a deck, sometimes a glossy one-pager pinned near the coffee machine. Six months later, someone asks how it’s going, and the honest answer is that very little has visibly changed. People are busy. Projects are running. None of them obviously trace back to the strategy that was meant to be driving them.
What makes this particular symptom hard to catch early is that it doesn’t announce itself through any single failure. No project misses a deadline in a way that triggers a review. No customer complains. No metric moves sharply in the wrong direction. Instead, the organisation continues operating in a way that, examined closely, has only a loose relationship to what the strategy actually called for — and because nothing acute is going wrong, there’s rarely an obvious trigger for anyone to step back and check.
Consider an organisation where a recurring fortnightly meeting exists solely to resolve a coordination problem between two teams. It has been running for well over a year. The problem it exists to manage is real and genuinely complicated, so on the surface the meeting looks like sensible governance — a standing forum for a standing issue. What is harder to see is that the meeting has never once addressed why the coordination problem keeps recurring. It resolves each instance efficiently and leaves the underlying cause untouched. A structural issue has quietly become routine work, and because it now has a home on the calendar, it has stopped looking like a problem at all.
That is what strategy failing to translate usually looks like from the inside. Not a dramatic collapse, but a slow substitution — activity that resembles progress standing in for the decisions that would actually move the plan forward.
What leaders usually conclude
The first explanation reached for is almost always communication. The strategy wasn’t explained clearly enough, or often enough, or by the right people. This is an appealing diagnosis because it’s fixable with more of something the organisation already knows how to do — more town halls, more cascaded messaging, more slides.
Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat, writing in what is now MIT Sloan Management Review, examined this territory directly and found the picture is more layered. Their research into what they called the “silent killers” of strategy implementation identified a cluster of mutually reinforcing barriers — among them unclear strategy and conflicting priorities, and poor vertical communication — that block execution largely invisibly to the leadership teams experiencing it. Communication is genuinely part of the picture. But their finding was that it rarely operates alone, and that treating it as the primary cause tends to leave the reinforcing barriers untouched.
A second common conclusion is that the strategy itself was wrong — too ambitious, too vague, or disconnected from market reality. Sometimes that’s true. But it is also the explanation that lets an organisation avoid a harder question: whether the mechanisms that are supposed to carry a good strategy into daily decisions actually exist, or whether they were assumed rather than built.
What the evidence suggests
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull’s multi-year study of more than 250 companies, published in Harvard Business Review, points at a different location for the breakdown. Their research found that only 9% of managers said they could reliably count on colleagues in other functions and units to deliver on commitments all of the time — roughly half said they could rely on them most of the time. The more striking finding, though, was about where the real friction sits: in most of the firms studied, vertical alignment — the cascade from strategy to plan to individual objective — worked reasonably well. The breakdown was lateral. Coordination across units, not communication down through them, was where execution actually unravelled.
That reframes the recurring-meeting pattern. It isn’t evidence of a communication failure so much as evidence that the organisation had no better mechanism for handling a cross-unit dependency than a standing meeting — and once that meeting existed, there was less pressure to build anything better. The strategy may have been perfectly well understood by everyone in the room. What it lacked was a route into the kind of cross-functional decision that the meeting was quietly absorbing instead of resolving.
There is also a subtler, easily missed possibility: that the plan was never actually wrong or unclear, and that what looks like non-translation is really just time. Some strategic shifts take longer to show up in visible behaviour than a quarterly review cycle is built to notice, and mistaking that lag for failure can lead an organisation to abandon a direction just as it was beginning to take hold.
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- Which of the organisation’s standing meetings exist to resolve a coordination problem, and which have quietly become the place that problem lives instead?
- Where a strategy has been communicated repeatedly without visible change, is the gap really about clarity — or about whether cross-functional decisions have anywhere to actually get made?
- How would leadership distinguish a strategy that has stalled from one that simply hasn’t had time to show up yet?
More on this topic: Strategy Execution.
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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