The Execution Gap: When Strategy Isn’t the Problem

Vision without execution is hallucination – Thomas Edison

The meeting has been running for nearly an hour when the statement is finally made. “We’re still working through the details.” It arrives smoothly, almost expectedly, and is received without question. Heads nod, laptops close, notebooks are put away and the conversation continues. It feels like business as usual. Everything remains, in essence, unremarkable. Yet almost everyone in the room understands what has actually been said. We are not ready to move. We are not confident this will work. We are not sure how this will take shape. Organisations rarely phrase it that way. Instead, they speak in phrases and slogans that sound constructive and responsible. Alignment. Buy-in. Clarity. Circle back. Collaboration. Details. Beneath these words lies a tension that many leadership teams are all too familiar with but seldom confront. Strategy isn’t the problem. Confidence in execution is.

This is the execution gap. It flies under the radar of the executive team and is rarely addressed in strategic planning sessions. It exists, unidentified, in the space between high-level vision and coordinated action, between ambition and the organisation’s ability to carry it. Once you begin to notice it, it becomes impossible to ignore, because it is visible everywhere but intangible. The strategy exists. It has been carefully developed, often over months. Stakeholders have contributed. Resources have been allocated. The announcement has been made. There may even have been a moment of excitement when the direction felt new and the ambition felt real. Then the strategy encounters the organisation, and something changes.

The company’s strategic evolution is typically gradual, almost imperceptible. Over time, meetings multiply. Conversations repeat. What was once thought to be resolved is now open to debate again. Progress continues, but it begins to require more effort than expected. Delivery becomes dependent on individuals pushing, chasing and escalating. No one says that strategy execution is failing. That would feel too strong, too premature and too difficult to prove. Instead, the language remains optimistic while the experience becomes demanding. Operational dysfunction embeds itself slowly, compounding day by day rather than failing all at once.

It is tempting to interpret this dysfunction as a signal that the strategy needs refinement. Perhaps the direction is unclear. Perhaps priorities need sharpening. Perhaps communication must improve. These responses feel sensible and responsible, which is why they occur so often across organisations. Yet many leadership teams privately sense that these explanations are incomplete. There is strategic clarity and alignment, shared ambition and capability. And still, organisational execution feels slower and harder than it should. The instinctive response is to apply more effort. More workshops. More cross-functional collaboration. More governance forums. More reporting. Each element offers standalone value. Collectively, they often slow the system down.

Effort increases. Progress does not. The organisation is spinning its wheels. There is lots of activity but little forward momentum. A great deal of energy is spent creating communication structures, building alignment and connecting teams. These activities are not misguided. Modern organisations depend on cross-functional collaboration, and complex work cannot be delivered in isolation. Yet collaboration can subtly become a replacement for confidence. Meetings increase while decision flow slows. Alignment conversations intensify when ownership is unclear. Working groups appear when decisions feel risky. The organisation begins to spend more time discussing work than moving it. Sight of the strategy is slowly lost.

The friction is difficult to name because it does not present as a technical failure. Organisations do not experience the execution gap as a lack of intelligence, effort or intent. They experience it as a subtle but persistent gap between how work is meant to move and how it actually moves. While the operating model is designed for smooth, coordinated effort, the lived experience is one of negotiation, escalation and delay. Over time, people adjust their behaviour accordingly, responding rationally to the conditions around them.

Cross-functional collaboration offers a useful lens through which this becomes visible. Few organisations would claim collaboration is unimportant. Most actively promote it, invest in it and encourage it. Yet it remains one of the most difficult capabilities to execute consistently. This difficulty is often framed as behavioural or cultural, as though the challenge lies in unwillingness rather than structure. In reality, collaboration across organisational boundaries is shaped by a far more complex set of forces.

Business units optimise for local performance because their incentives require them to. Budgets are held within functions. Accountability is experienced individually while outcomes are shared. Lines of authority blur between departments. Information is unevenly distributed. Risk is personal, while reward is collective. Under these conditions, collaboration becomes fragile. It depends on goodwill, persistence and informal influence rather than reliable organisational design.

What appears, on the surface, to be a behavioural challenge is often a structural one. When people hesitate, delay or seek reassurance, they are frequently responding to signals embedded in the system — signals about how decisions are made, how accountability is enforced and how priorities shift over time. These signals are rarely intentional, yet they are consistently observed. And once observed, they shape behaviour.

This is where the execution gap deepens into something more systemic. Confidence in organisational execution does not erode in isolation. It erodes as people notice patterns: decisions revisited, ownership shifting, priorities competing, information appearing unevenly, escalation becoming routine. Over time, the organisation begins to rely less on its structures and more on individual persistence. Momentum becomes something that must be created manually rather than something the system naturally supports.

In this light, the execution gap begins to look less like a failure of belief and more like the cumulative effect of structural incoherence. The strategy may be sound, but the operational environment is not conducive to implementation. The pathways through which decisions travel, the clarity of authority across boundaries and the alignment between incentives, accountability and outcomes all come into focus. Confidence in execution becomes the most visible symptom of these conditions rather than their root cause.

The burden of this gap is often carried by the layers just below senior leadership. Directors, heads of function and programme leaders find themselves translating ambition into coordinated action across boundaries they do not fully control. They chase responses, re-explain priorities, rebuild alignment, negotiate ownership and escalate decisions. Much of this labour remains invisible to senior leadership, yet it consumes enormous organisational energy.

Subtly, a new trend begins to emerge. Underperformance becomes easier to explain and harder to challenge. Missed targets are attributed to market conditions, resource constraints or overly ambitious projections. Forecasts soften. Expectations adjust. The gap between aspiration and delivery becomes familiar enough to feel normal.

A culture of underperformance rarely appears overnight. It emerges gradually when the expectation that plans will not be fully delivered becomes quietly embedded in everyday thinking. Strategic alignment begins to drift. People agree with the direction, but they no longer feel confident in the organisation’s ability to carry it. Commitment becomes cautious. Enthusiasm becomes measured. Momentum becomes fragile.

In environments where change is constant and complexity continues to increase, this space between strategic intent and coordinated action becomes increasingly significant. Work no longer sits neatly inside one team. Boards, investors, regulators and customers now expect faster delivery, constant innovation, visible results and rapid response to change. The tolerance for slow progress has dropped, and organisations are under more pressure to deliver reliably. Strategies once lasted years. Now markets shift quickly, technology changes constantly, regulation evolves continuously and competitors move fast. Organisations must execute while the ground keeps moving. Execution becomes a strategic capability. The ability to turn plans into coordinated action is no longer a back-office activity; it is a leadership and board-level capability.

And yet the conversation about organisational execution often remains indirect. Leaders discuss culture, transformation and performance while the underlying tension remains partially unnamed. If the strategy is not the problem, where should attention turn? This question is beginning to surface more frequently in private conversations. It signals a shift in how leadership teams are starting to think about performance. Strategy execution is no longer seen as a downstream activity that naturally follows planning. It is emerging as a discipline in its own right.

For now, the execution gap remains a largely invisible force shaping organisational life. It reveals itself through hesitation, repetition and the slow, unspoken erosion of confidence. It appears in meetings that end without decisions, in plans that take longer to implement than expected and in the silent concern that momentum is harder to sustain than it should be. It is rarely dramatic. Often, it is barely visible. But once recognised, it becomes difficult to ignore. And the question it leaves behind is not easily answered.