Bridging the Divide: Understanding and closing the Strategy Execution gap
Despite well crafted strategies, many organisations struggle to turn vision into reality. Research shows approximately 70% of strategic initiatives fail to deliver intended outcomes, with some IT projects so disastrous they threaten company survival. This disconnect between strategic intent and operational execution is known as the “strategy execution gap”. This gap costs organisations more than money. Over time, it will erode trust, waste resources, and damage morale often spiralling into reduced levels of reported employee satisfaction.
What’s most puzzling is that while executives recognise employee interaction as the greatest barrier to execution, they persistently focus on restructuring governance and processes when implementing change. This phenomenon, aptly called “the tyranny of the tangible,” keeps organisations trapped in outdated management approaches. Executive leaders gravitate toward structure, process, and governance because these elements are concrete, measurable, and visible. These tangible elements create a comfort zone for leaders, where the illusion of control feels reassuring amid uncertainty. When faced with the prospect of opening strategic conversations to wider participation, many leaders experience a visceral discomfort driven by fear of losing control. As Reynolds and Lewis note in their report on some direct feedback from their executive participants, “We feel like we would lose control... resistance to our plans would surface.”
The irony is stark. Organisations loudly proclaim ambitions to be more innovative and adaptable, while their leaders simultaneously fear what might happen without this sense of control. Breaking free from this pattern requires leaders to confront a deeply uncomfortable truth. Successful strategy execution demands surrendering some control to gain greater collective capability.
Understanding the Strategy Execution Gap table
The Strategy Execution Gap table maps the journey from good intentions to disappointing outcomes across five critical dimensions. It illustrates how leadership’s well intended actions (executive retreats and boardroom debates) consistently transform into problematic realities (strategy cascading downward) through specific gaps in organisational capability. These five gaps represent the core drivers behind execution failure. As strategies move from conception to implementation, these gaps progressively erode effectiveness, ultimately resulting in confusion about purpose, apathy toward strategic success, execution divorced from frontline realities, wasted resources, and missed opportunities.
Let’s explore these five critical gaps that prevent strategy from becoming reality, and how an open strategy approach might bridge these divides.
The Five Critical Gaps
1. Lack of Alignment: When strategic intent gets lost in translation
What it is: Alignment exists when everyone understands not just what the strategy is, but why it matters. Without alignment, strategic vision cascades downward, disconnecting teams from the purpose driving organisational decisions.
What research tells us: Sustainable execution requires alignment across value, profit, and people propositions. Leaders often fail to appreciate how much time they’ve had to process strategic context, overestimating clarity and underestimating the journey others need to take.
The result: Teams operate in isolation without understanding how their work contributes to broader objectives. This creates confusion about purpose, conflicting priorities, and wasted efforts as people disconnect from the strategic “why.”
2. Lack of Ownership: When strategy belongs to “Them,” not “Us”
What it is: Ownership emerges when people feel personally invested in a strategy’s success. Without ownership, strategy becomes something imposed from above rather than something people actively shape.
What research tells us: Too many organisations still treat employees as “cogs” in a strategic machine. Leaders invest significant energy aligning perspectives within their own group, making broader engagement seem daunting—especially with operational demands that build up while strategy making takes priority.
The result: Without ownership, employees become indifferent or resistant to strategic initiatives. People implement without commitment or actively resist changes they had no part in shaping. Even brilliant strategies falter when those implementing them lack emotional investment in their success.
3. Lack of Autonomy: When dialogue gives way to directives
What it is: Autonomy enables people to determine how best to accomplish strategic objectives within their expertise areas. Without autonomy, strategies become rigid directives rather than frameworks for guided innovation.
What research tells us: When leaders resort to one way communication, events like town halls merely invite employees to comment on already finalised proposals. Successful execution requires more than top down direction—it needs conditions where people feel empowered to contribute meaningfully.
The result: Organisations miss opportunities to leverage frontline insights that could improve implementation. Execution becomes divorced from operational realities, as strategies implemented without employee input typically prove ineffective and waste resources.
4. Lack of Flexibility: When rigid planning inhibits adaptive response
What it is: Flexibility allows strategies to evolve in response to changing circumstances. Without flexibility, planning frameworks become constraining rather than directional tools.
What research tells us: Many organisations still operate with industrial age management approaches that presume certainty and stability. When change becomes necessary, leaders instinctively pull harder on the same levers used during stable times rather than adopting new approaches.
The result: Systems and processes become inflexible constraints leading to an inability to respond to emerging challenges. Resources get wasted on increasingly irrelevant activities as organisations continue executing against outdated assumptions.
5. Lack of Adaptability: When strategic momentum surrenders to organisational Inertia
What it is: Adaptability enables organisations to shift course as strategic realities evolve. Without adaptability, strategic momentum gets lost amid bureaucratic processes for course correction.
What research tells us: Leaders need to create space for people to make sense and have influence through iterative dialogue. Today’s high performing organisations have found ways to leverage many people’s contributions at scale rather than relying on rigid hierarchies.
The result: Organisations experience inertia when pivots are needed. Opportunities are missed while processes grind on, as bureaucratic hurdles prevent nimble responses to changing conditions, emerging threats, or new possibilities.
Conclusion: Embracing Open Strategy
The strategy execution gap doesn’t stem primarily from faulty structures or processes as the “tangible” elements executives typically prioritise. Rather, it emerges from human elements of a lack of genuine engagement, heart felt commitment, and nurturing of adaptability.
To bridge this gap, leaders must adopt an open strategy approach that:
1. Creates meaningful alignment by engaging people in understanding both the “what” and “why” of strategic direction
2. Fosters genuine ownership by involving employees in shaping strategy rather than merely implementing it
3. Enables appropriate autonomy by focusing on outcomes rather than dictating precise methods
4. Builds flexible frameworks that guide rather than constrain implementation
5. Embraces adaptability by establishing feedback loops that allow strategies to evolve
By treating strategy execution as a collaborative, iterative process rather than a mechanical implementation exercise, organisations can transform their approach from one where strategy is done “to” people to one where it’s done “with” them. This shift may require going slower initially to ultimately move faster, creating space for genuine interaction characterised by curiosity, expression of ideas, and experimentation. In doing so, they can finally close the persistent gap between strategic ambition and operational reality.
The outcome this time? A strategy that truly comes alive throughout your organisation, driving sustainable results that have a real and lasting impact.
Is your organisation struggling to understand and close the strategy execution gap? Let's explore how an open strategy approach could help your team thrive. Book a call to start the conversation.
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