The Strategy Lifecycle
Why Strategy Doesn’t Stick - And What To Do About It
Traditional strategy focuses on two phases: formulation and implementation. But this approach is missing two critical links that determine whether strategies succeed or fail: activation and adaptive execution. Here’s why they matter now more than ever.
Leaders are invested in getting together to craft strategy. They often dedicate whole days for offsite strategic planning to collaborate on dissecting external forces, identifying the biggest opportunities and setting out a future vision they can all get behind. Important stuff and well worth that investment.
Yet 70% of strategic initiatives fail during execution. Not because of poor strategy. Not because of incompetent teams. But because of a fundamental collaboration gap that most leaders never see coming.
Executive leaders cascade the new strategy across the organisation and then want to just get on with the doing. It’s like watching a world-class composer write a symphony, then expecting the orchestra to perform it beautifully without ever rehearsing together or discussing the composer’s vision.
The problem isn’t usually the quality of the strategy or the talent of the people executing it. It is the missing bridge between the two. Strategies need to be ‘activated’ to bring them to life. People across the organisation will be motivated if they understand why it matters and the decisions that have been made on where to play and how to win that is the centrepiece of the strategy. If the orchestra gets the opportunity to play with the new composition, ask questions of the composer and hear firsthand what the overall vision is, we are more likely to get a sweeping harmonic version of the piece. So what if organizations invested as much energy in translating strategy into organizational commitment as they do in crafting it?
The Four Phases that Make Strategy Stick
Figure 1: The Strategy Lifecycle
Think of strategy as a dynamic, cyclical journey with four essential phases that often overlap: Formulation (the creative and critical thinking foundation where strategy is born), Activation (the bridge that transforms plans into organizational commitment), Implementation (the structural setup that organizes resources and systems), and Execution (the ongoing adaptation and feedback loop that makes strategy successful in practice).
While implementation falls squarely in most leaders’ comfort zones since it’s all about structure, processes and governance, activation and execution demand something entirely different. Strategy activation requires the influence and communication skills to build genuine organizational buy-in. Adaptive execution demands dynamic leadership that can navigate ambiguity, foster collaboration and pivot based on real-world feedback.
Why Strategy Fails After the Planning
I worked with Sarah, a seasoned Executive leader, who had just spent three months with her leadership team developing what she believes is their best strategy yet. The vision is clear, the objectives are aspirational and the business case has been described as a ‘no regrets’ investment. The leadership team had spent so much time on building the case for investment and managing up, that once it was approved and they had distributed the plan across their teams, they all jumped back into their neglected operational leadership loads. Six months later, she was staring at disappointing results and a team that seems disconnected from the very strategy they’re supposed to be executing. Sound familiar? Sarah was experiencing a problem that thousands of leaders face.
The problem isn’t poor strategy or planning or lack of resources. It’s what strategy researcher Donald Sull calls “the linear approach that splits the formulation of strategy from its execution.” Traditional strategy frameworks jump straight from formulation to implementation, like trying to leap across a canyon in a single bound. But here’s what the research reveals: successful strategy requires what Sull describes as “an iterative loop” with distinct phases, not a straight line from plan to action. Sarah and her team had missed the strategy activation and execution phases after the prolonged formulation and approval of their strategy.
Strategy as a Dynamic Loop: What the Research Says
Sull’s research in MIT Sloan Management Review exposes why linear approaches fail so spectacularly. “Planners craft their strategy at the beginning of the process, precisely when they know the least about how events will unfold,” he notes.
The solution? A cyclical framework with essential phases: making sense of the situation (formulation), making choices, making things happen (activation), and making revisions (adaptive execution).These phases work together like Sull’s iterative loop, each building on the last, creating the conditions for genuine ownership, meaningful autonomy and adaptive responses.
This research validates what many leaders intuitively know but struggle to articulate. There are critical missing pieces between strategy formulation and successful execution. Strategy activation, like Sull’s “making things happen” phase, is where plans must be systematically translated into organizational action and commitment.
Adaptive execution, his “making revisions” phase, recognizes that “executing the strategy generates new information that becomes difficult to incorporate into the prefabricated plan” unless there are systematic processes for continuous adaptation. For more information on the differences between strategy activation and execution, and in fact, all of the four phases of the strategy lifecycle, download the comparison table here.
The evidence is compelling. Organizations that try to skip these phases fall into what Sull identifies as “escalation of commitment to a failing course of action, even as evidence mounts that the original strategy was based on flawed assumptions.” They end up rushing to execute flawed plans, ensuring they “get to the wrong place faster than anyone else.”
Your strategy ‘Activation’ starts now
Look at your current strategic priorities and identify one where execution is lagging. Before diving into more planning or restructuring, ask: “Who hasn’t been part of shaping this strategy but will be critical to its success?” Then invest the time to bring them into meaningful dialogue about not just what the strategy is, but why it matters and how it can work in practice. The advantage belongs to organizations that can bridge the strategy-execution gap and that bridge is built one conversation at a time.
Are you ready to become the ultimate leader as strategist? Let’s talk.
Forwarded by a colleague? Get these strategy insights in your inbox every month. Subscribe here;
Ready to book a complimentary chat?