The symptom
Regional leadership teams spanning fast-moving Asia Pacific markets frequently describe a specific and disorienting pattern: the formal signs of alignment are all present — shared objectives, regular regional calls, a common set of reported metrics — yet individual country or market leaders are, in effect, making materially different calls on strategy, pricing, or prioritisation than the rest of the team assumed had been settled. The alignment looks real on paper and does not hold in practice.
What leaders usually conclude — and what the evidence suggests instead
The common conclusion is that individual market leaders are not communicating well, or are not committed to the regional strategy. Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety and learning behaviour, based on a field study of 51 manufacturing work teams, suggests a more specific and less accusatory explanation. Edmondson found that team psychological safety — not team efficacy — predicted learning behaviour, and that learning behaviour in turn mediated team performance. In a fast-moving regional context, where market conditions in one country can shift meaningfully faster than a monthly or quarterly regional cadence can register, a market leader who does not feel safe raising “the regional plan doesn’t fit what’s happening here right now” is more likely to quietly deviate from the plan than to surface the disagreement — which produces exactly the divergence-without-visible-disagreement pattern leadership teams describe.
Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat’s research on the “silent killers” of strategy implementation adds a structural layer. Their work identifies poor vertical communication and an unclear or conflicting set of priorities as recurring, often invisible barriers to execution — barriers that, in their words, block the organisation from “transforming that barrier into a capability,” after which none of the other barriers can be resolved either. In a fast-moving multi-market region, the pace of local change routinely outstrips the pace at which regional priorities get formally revisited, which creates exactly the conditions Beer and Eisenstat describe: priorities that are technically still “the plan” but that local leaders increasingly know, without anyone having said so out loud, no longer fit their market.
Together, Edmondson’s and Beer and Eisenstat’s findings describe a specific causal chain rather than two independent explanations. A market condition changes faster than the regional cadence can absorb; a local leader notices the gap between the plan and the reality first, because they are closest to it; whether that gap gets surfaced to the regional team depends on psychological safety, per Edmondson’s finding; and if it is not surfaced, the “silent killer” Beer and Eisenstat describe — a priority nobody has formally revised but that no longer fits the situation on the ground — quietly takes hold. The alignment that appears to exist on paper is, in this chain, actually the absence of a signal that something needs to change, not evidence that nothing has.
What it looks like in practice
The pattern typically surfaces first in small deviations that are individually defensible — a market leader adjusting pricing, sequencing, or a go-to-market emphasis in response to a fast-moving local condition — that only become visible as a pattern of misalignment when compared across markets at the regional level, usually well after each individual decision was made. Because Asia Pacific spans markets moving at genuinely different speeds and along different competitive and regulatory timelines, what looks like “slow to align” from a regional vantage point is often, from the local market’s vantage point, an entirely reasonable response to conditions the regional cadence has not yet caught up with.
It is most acute where the formal regional cadence (quarterly reviews, for instance) is slow relative to the pace of change in the fastest-moving markets in the region, and where market leaders do not have a clear, safe channel to flag “the plan needs to change” before they act rather than after. It is less acute in regions or functions where local leaders have both a fast informal channel to surface disagreement and genuine confidence that raising it will be heard rather than treated as a lack of commitment.
A common misconception is that the fix is tighter central control or more frequent formal reporting. Edmondson’s research suggests the more precise lever is psychological safety specifically — whether team members believe they can raise a problem or a disagreement without it being held against them — which more frequent reporting alone does not create, and can in some cases actively discourage if the reporting cadence itself feels like scrutiny rather than genuine two-way dialogue.
The consequence of leaving this pattern unaddressed tends to compound specifically around personnel changes. A market leader who has been quietly managing the gap between the regional plan and local reality, without surfacing it, is carrying institutional knowledge that is invisible to the rest of the regional team — and when that person moves on, the organisation frequently loses not just their output but the accumulated, undocumented judgement about where the regional plan and local conditions have already diverged. Their successor often has to rediscover the same misalignment from scratch, at real cost, because the previous leader’s adaptations were never surfaced as information the regional team could use.
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
- Do market leaders have a genuine, low-friction way to say “the regional plan doesn’t fit what’s happening here” before they act, rather than only being asked to explain after the fact?
- Is the regional cadence for revisiting priorities keeping pace with how quickly the fastest-moving markets in the region are actually changing?
- Where has a pattern of “individually defensible” local deviations only become visible once compared across markets — and how much earlier could it have surfaced?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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