Most strategies are good enough to succeed; they fail in the journey from intent to action.
This isn't a leadership failure. It isn't a delivery failure either. It's something more structural - a breakdown that happens in the space between intent and action, between the boardroom and the backlog.
Most strategy failures aren't failures of thinking. They're failures of translation.
Strategy failure is not mysterious
Search for "why strategies fail" and you'll find no shortage of explanations. The usual suspects appear in article after article:
- Lack of alignment
- Poor communication
- Resistance to change
- Unclear ownership
- Failure to adapt
These explanations aren't wrong. But they're not root causes either. They're symptoms of something deeper going wrong.
The statistics tell a stark story. Studies have found that 50% of middle managers can't name any of their organisation's top five strategic objectives. Less than 5% of employees have even a basic understanding of their company's strategy. And 81% of workers say they spend less than three hours a day on work they consider impactful.
The message is being sent. It's just not arriving intact.
What actually breaks is the connective tissue between strategy and execution; the mechanisms that should carry intent from one layer of the organisation to the next.
Lost in translation: the real gap
When I look at where translation fails, I see three dimensions:
- Perspective: How different layers of an organisation see and prioritise the world around them.
- Ways of working: The rhythms, tools, and cadences that shape how work actually happens.
- Language: The words and shorthand that each group develops to communicate efficiently within itself.
These differences are structural; they're inevitable. And unless something actively counteracts them, they widen over time.
Think of it like a smooth rock. Once a small crack appears, water gets in and erosion does the rest. Over time, one rock becomes two. Organisational differences work the same way. Once they exist, they entrench and deviate further from each other.
Perspective: different levels, different worlds
Organisations naturally operate in layers. Strategic, operational, execution. Each layer optimises for different concerns, sees different risks, and measures success differently.
Senior leadership thinks in markets, competitive positioning, and multi-year horizons. Middle management translates that into programmes, dependencies, and quarterly targets. Frontline teams work in sprints, tickets, and the immediate problems in front of them.
Each perspective is valid. Each is necessary. But each comes with what I think of as hierarchical blinkers.
Not the kind of blinkers that block your peripheral vision - the kind that block your view up and down. People are rewarded for looking forward, for delivering in their own domain. Curiosity about what's happening in the layers above or below is rarely designed into how organisations work.
The result? If you can't see how your work moves the strategic dial, it doesn't feel strategic. And if it doesn't feel strategic, it becomes just another task to complete rather than a contribution to something larger.
Ways of working: mismatched rhythms and tools
Strategy thinks in years and quarters. Execution works in weeks, days, or hours. This cadence mismatch creates constant friction.
Senior leadership sets direction in annual planning cycles. They review progress quarterly. Middle management works in monthly rhythms, balancing competing priorities across teams. Frontline workers operate in sprints - two weeks if they're lucky, sometimes just reacting to whatever's most urgent that day.
The tools reinforce this separation. Planning and reporting tools live at the top. Delivery tools - the ticketing systems, the repositories, the operational dashboards - live at the front line. Information flows up through layers of aggregation and summarisation. Context gets lost at every handoff.
There's a saying:
strategies are born in spreadsheets and die in slides.
The problem isn't the tools themselves. It's the lack of intentional connection between them. Without deliberate effort to bridge these different rhythms and systems, strategy and execution drift apart - not through anyone's fault, but through the natural entropy of organisational life.
Language: when everyone is speaking clearly and nobody understands
Every layer develops its own shorthand. Senior leaders talk about north star metrics, ROI, and market positioning. Middle management speaks of KPIs, dependency maps, and stakeholder alignment. Technical teams discuss infrastructure as code, observability stacks, and deployment pipelines.
This specialised language is efficient. It allows people to communicate complex ideas quickly to others who share their context. But it becomes a barrier when communication needs to cross layers.
Terms that feel precise and meaningful to one group can feel abstract, threatening, or simply meaningless to another. When a senior leader asks about "strategic alignment," a frontline developer might hear bureaucratic overhead. When a technical team talks about "technical debt," leadership might hear excuses for slow delivery.
Neither interpretation is fair. But both are understandable when groups lack shared vocabulary.
When language doesn't translate, intent doesn't travel. The strategy that felt clear and compelling in the boardroom becomes vague and disconnected by the time it reaches the people who need to execute it.
Why this is nobody's fault
Here's what we should be clear about: these differences are necessary.
You need senior leaders who can think strategically about markets and competition. You need middle managers who can coordinate across teams and manage dependencies. You need frontline workers who can focus deeply on the technical problems in front of them.
Specialisation is necessary. But organisations rarely design for translation. They assume alignment will happen automatically; that if the strategy is good enough and communicated clearly enough, everyone will naturally understand their part in it.
But alignment doesn't happen automatically. It requires deliberate mechanisms, consistent effort, and ongoing attention. Without that investment, the gaps widen. The cracks deepen. And strategy becomes something that exists in documents rather than in daily work.
Where strategy actually breaks
The strategy is usually sound. The breakdown comes at handoff, interpretation, and adaptation.
The executives who craft the strategy aren't failing. The managers who try to translate it aren't failing. The teams who struggle to connect their work to larger goals aren't failing. The system is failing - or rather, the system was never designed to succeed at this particular challenge.
The solution isn't more documents. It isn't better slide decks or more comprehensive communications. It's deliberate translation mechanisms; ways of actively bridging the gaps in perspective, ways of working, and language that naturally emerge in any organisation.
This is the first part of a two-part series on bridging the gap between strategy and execution.
In the next post, I'll look at what actually helps close this gap, and what organisations can do differently without adding bureaucracy or noise.
Ady Coles works with leadership teams to help strategy survive contact with reality. His focus is on strategy management and agile strategy delivery - designing the translation between intent and execution so that direction remains coherent as organisations move, grow, and adapt. He works as a fractional and advisory partner where clarity, judgement, and sustained alignment matter more than plans on paper.