What the research found
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, publishing in Harvard Business Review after a multi-year study of more than 250 companies, located the primary breakdown in lateral coordination. Vertical alignment — the cascade from strategy to plan to individual objective — was generally sound across the firms studied. What failed was coordination between units: only 9% of managers said they could reliably rely on colleagues in other functions and units to deliver on commitments all of the time. Their account is structural: plans fail not because they were poorly conceived, but because the organisation lacks a reliable mechanism for coordinating execution across its own internal boundaries.
Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat, in what is now MIT Sloan Management Review, identified a different but related cluster of causes — the “silent killers” of strategy implementation, including unclear strategy and conflicting priorities, and poor vertical communication, each reinforcing the others largely below leadership’s own awareness. Their account locates more of the problem earlier, in the strategy’s own clarity and in how well senior teams communicate it downward, rather than primarily in lateral coordination once execution is underway.
Larry Greiner’s research on organisational growth, first published in Harvard Business Review, offers a third and more structural account still: that a strategy which was entirely appropriate for the organisation’s previous stage of growth can become mismatched to what the organisation has become, simply because growth outpaces the mechanisms built to support the plan. On this account, plans don’t fail because they were wrong when written — they fail because the organisation around them changed faster than the plan did.
V. F. Ridgway’s research, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, adds a fourth and again distinct explanation: that the very act of measuring progress against a plan can distort the behaviour meant to deliver it, as people and teams optimise for what’s measured rather than for the plan’s actual intent — sometimes satisfying every metric while missing the underlying goal entirely.
Where they agree — and where they diverge
These four accounts agree on one thing clearly: none of them locates the primary cause of plan failure in the plan’s content being wrong. Sull and colleagues found vertical strategic alignment generally sound. Beer and Eisenstat’s barriers are about implementation conditions, not strategic logic. Greiner’s account is about organisational fit over time, not the soundness of any single plan. Ridgway’s is about measurement distortion, which by definition presumes the underlying goal was reasonable. Taken together, they push back — collectively and independently — against the popular assumption that plans mostly fail because they were badly thought through in the first place.
Where they diverge is on where, specifically, the failure enters. Is it lateral (Sull), earlier and more foundational (Beer & Eisenstat), a function of organisational change outpacing the plan (Greiner), or introduced by the measurement system itself (Ridgway)? Each explanation is supported by real research, examining real organisations, and none of the four researchers appears to have set out to contradict the others — they were studying different aspects of the same broad territory and arrived at different, non-mutually-exclusive answers.
What remains unresolved
What the combined research doesn’t offer is a single, ranked cause — a way of saying that lateral coordination matters more than clarity, or that organisational growth outpaces plans more reliably than measurement distorts them. It’s entirely plausible that all four operate simultaneously in most organisations, in proportions that vary by context, and that no single body of research was positioned to weigh them against each other directly.
What’s genuinely useful about holding all four at once, rather than settling on a favourite, is that they point a leadership team toward different diagnostic questions depending on where their own plan seems to be struggling: is the strategy clear, or does it merely feel clear to the people who wrote it? Is coordination across functions actually happening, or assumed? Has the organisation itself changed since the plan was approved, in ways the plan hasn’t caught up with? And do the metrics tracking progress actually represent the plan’s intent, or something more easily counted instead?
The same pattern appears across many kinds of organisation; see Other Sectors for how it is read elsewhere.
Questions worth considering
- Is the figure the organisation relies on for how often plans fail one it could trace back to a source?
- Has the organisation changed since the plan was approved in ways the plan does not yet reflect?
- Do the measures tracking progress represent the plan’s intent, or whatever happened to be easiest to count?
This perspective is part of Strategy Execution.
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