What four bodies of research found
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, in Harvard Business Review, studied more than 250 companies and found that lateral coordination between functions — not vertical alignment — was where execution most reliably broke down, with only 9% of managers reporting they could rely on cross-functional colleagues all of the time. Coordination of this kind isn’t a condition that gets established once at launch; it’s continuously maintained or continuously eroding, which is itself a claim about execution being ongoing rather than a completed state.
Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat, in what is now MIT Sloan Management Review, found that implementation barriers reinforce each other, concluding that “without transforming that barrier into a capability, none of the other barriers can be turned into capabilities either.” A capability, by definition, is something maintained over time — not a milestone reached once and left behind.
The word choice there is deliberate and worth dwelling on: Beer and Eisenstat describe the goal as transforming a barrier into a capability, not simply removing the barrier. Removal implies a one-time act — the obstacle is gone. Building a capability implies an ongoing state that has to be sustained against whatever pressures would otherwise erode it, which is a meaningfully different and more demanding standard than simply clearing a blockage once.
Larry Greiner, in Harvard Business Review, found that practices well-suited to one phase of organisational growth become the source of crisis in the next, meaning that even a well-executed plan can become mismatched to an organisation that has changed since the plan was approved — a mismatch that can only be caught by ongoing attention, not by anything decided at launch.
V. F. Ridgway, in Administrative Science Quarterly, found that the measures used to track progress can distort the behaviour meant to deliver it over time, as people gradually optimise toward the measure rather than the underlying goal — a drift that happens continuously across a plan’s lifespan, not at any single decision point.
Where they converge
None of these four studies was framed around the question of whether execution is a one-time event or an ongoing discipline. And yet each identifies a failure mode that is fundamentally continuous rather than momentary: coordination that has to be maintained, capability that has to be sustained, organisational fit that has to be periodically reassessed, and measurement that has to be periodically checked against its own distorting effects. None of these is something a leadership team gets right once, at launch, and can then set aside.
That convergence, across four separate research traditions that weren’t in conversation with each other, is more persuasive than any single study arguing the point directly would be. It suggests that treating strategy execution primarily as a launch event — significant, well-resourced, but essentially complete once the initial rollout has happened — misreads what the research, collectively, is describing. Each study points to a different mechanism, but all four mechanisms operate continuously, for as long as the strategy is meant to be in effect.
It’s worth naming what makes this convergence more than coincidence. Coordination, capability, organisational fit and measurement integrity are each, by their nature, states rather than milestones — conditions that hold or don’t hold at any given moment, rather than boxes that get ticked once. A launch event can establish the initial conditions for each of these to be strong. None of the four studies suggests a launch event can guarantee any of them will remain strong, because nothing about a single point in time controls what happens in every subsequent month the strategy remains in effect.
What remains genuinely open
What this synthesis doesn’t resolve is how much ongoing attention is actually required, or what form it should take in a given organisation — that varies enormously by context, and none of the four studies offers a formula that would generalise cleanly. It’s also worth holding the alternative honestly: it’s possible some organisations genuinely do execute well with less continuous attention than this research collectively implies, and the four studies, however consistent with each other, don’t amount to proof that every organisation needs the same degree of ongoing focus.
What does seem reasonably well supported is the more modest claim: that treating execution as complete once a plan has launched is where a meaningful share of the divergence between intended and actual results appears to originate, across several genuinely independent bodies of evidence.
Looking for your own sector? The Other Sectors page points to the closest match.
Questions worth considering
- At what point after launch does anyone next ask whether a strategy is still being carried out as intended — and what prompts that question?
- Which parts of execution depend on conditions that must be maintained month after month rather than established once?
- If attention to a plan fell away after the launch event, what, if anything, would reveal it?
This perspective is part of Strategy Execution.
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