Organisations have never been better at strategy formulation. The thinking is sharper, the frameworks more refined, the alignment sessions more frequent. And yet, a familiar pattern persists: strategies that made sense in the planning room lose coherence the moment they make contact with the organisation that has to deliver them.
The usual explanation points to execution. The strategy was right, the logic goes, so something went wrong in delivery. This is a comforting story. It is also, in most cases, the wrong one.
The place where strategy succeeds or fails is not the boardroom. It is operations - where intent encounters people, constraints, systems, and time. And most organisations have fundamentally misunderstood what happens there.
The collision
Strategy does not arrive in neutral space. It enters a system already shaped by existing processes, organisational history, power dynamics, skills, incentives, and capacity. These conditions are not temporary inconveniences. They are the terrain.
When strategic intent meets that terrain, it does not deploy cleanly. It transforms. Abstract goals collide with finite time, competing priorities, incomplete information, and the complexities of human behaviour. What looks like poor execution is often just exposure: the strategy's assumptions meeting the world they were meant to navigate but had never actually encountered until now.
This is not a problem to be solved. It is a dynamic to be understood.
Common misunderstandings
Operations carries a few persistent misunderstandings that distort how organisations respond when strategies don't land.
The first is that operations is primarily about efficiency. Optimisation, throughput, cost control. This reduces the function to a set of levers, and it misses the sense-making that operations teams perform every day: choosing between competing priorities, interpreting unclear direction, filling the gaps that the strategy left unaddressed. This is not efficiency work. It is strategic work, done without the title.
The second is that operations is neutral. That it simply carries out instructions issued from elsewhere. This overlooks the judgement required when conditions diverge from the plan. Operations teams make dozens of decisions daily about what to prioritise, what to defer, and what to reconcile. These decisions shape how strategy actually plays out. Treating them as invisible doesn't make them disappear.
The third is that operations is a bottleneck. When things slow down, operations takes the blame. But slowdowns in delivery often reflect unresolved tension higher up: unclear priorities, conflicting mandates, ambitions that exceed available capacity. Operations doesn't create this friction; it makes it visible.
Operations is a sensing function
Operations is where misalignments become visible. The first place trade-offs are felt, rather than discussed in the abstract. The point at which priorities that appeared compatible in a strategy document begin to compete for the same resources, the same time, the same attention.
A strategy built for speed runs into governance requirements that insist on care. A growth ambition meets hiring constraints that no one built into the plan. A platform vision exposes decision rights that nobody defined when the work was still theoretical.
These are not operational failures. They are strategic tensions made visible through operational reality. Operations reveals the real strategy - not the one the organisation announced, but the one it can actually sustain.
This is the same gap that appears between declared strategy and lived delivery - the space where intent meets reality and coherence is either reinforced or eroded.
What happens when this is ignored
When organisations treat operations as a downstream concern, the costs accumulate in ways that are easy to miss at first and difficult to reverse later.
Plans get re-announced without anyone examining why the first attempt stalled. Delivery teams grow sceptical, having watched too many strategies arrive with conviction and dissolve within months. Workarounds embed themselves. Informal fixes quietly replace deliberate choices. And leaders begin to interpret the resulting friction as resistance or incompetence, when what they are often seeing is the system surfacing something the strategy left unresolved.
This is not inevitable. But it is predictable when operational reality is treated as someone else's concern.
A shift in stance
When operations is taken seriously as a strategic function, the change is more about posture than process.
Leaders become genuinely curious about constraints rather than impatient with them. Operational voices join strategy conversations earlier, as a source of intelligence about what the organisation can actually do, rather than an afterthought. Trade-offs are owned openly rather than deferred. Fewer things come as a surprise because the hard realities are faced sooner.
Treating operations as strategic does not make decisions easier. It makes them honest.
The real question
Strategy lives or dies where it meets the reality of the business’ operating practices. Operations is not a function to be streamlined or managed into compliance. It is the place where ambition is tested against conditions, adapted to constraints, and either made workable or revealed as something the organisation is not yet ready to sustain.
The question worth asking is not how to get operations to execute strategy better. It is whether organisations are prepared to let operations show them what their strategy actually looks like.
Ady Coles helps organisations reduce operational friction so strategy has a chance to work. He focuses on operational clarity, sensible governance, and the thoughtful use of automation; not optimisation for its own sake, but making work easier, decisions clearer, and scale more sustainable as organisations grow.