Strategy Is Usually Not The Problem

I have worked with enough organisations over the years to become increasingly sceptical when a business tells me that its biggest problem is its strategy. Sometimes it is, of course. Markets change, competitors move, customer expectations evolve and technology can fundamentally alter the economics of an industry. Poor strategic choices can absolutely destroy value. However, in my experience, strategy is much less often the problem than leaders think. The more common problem is what happens after the strategy has been agreed, when the organisation has to translate a series of strategic intentions into decisions, priorities, behaviours and measurable outcomes.

It is relatively easy to develop a strategy that sounds compelling. Most strategic plans contain the right language around growth, customer experience, innovation, operational excellence, digital transformation, people and culture, and market expansion. The difficulty comes when you start asking what those words actually mean for the organisation and the people expected to deliver them. What specifically are we going to do differently, who is accountable for the outcome, what resources will be allocated, what decisions need to change, what are we going to stop doing, and how will we know whether the strategy is working? Those questions tend to expose whether an organisation genuinely has a strategy that can be executed, or whether it has simply produced a document describing what it would like to achieve.

This is something I have encountered repeatedly across businesses going through growth, turnaround, transformation and change. The circumstances are often very different, but the underlying pattern can be remarkably similar. The leadership team believes the strategy is clear, yet different parts of the organisation are working towards different priorities. One executive is focused on revenue growth, another is trying to reduce costs, another is protecting operational stability, while another is pursuing a transformation program that requires significant investment. Everyone is busy, everyone can explain what they are responsible for, and everyone may genuinely believe they are contributing to the strategy, but the organisation as a whole is not necessarily moving in the same direction.

That is the alignment problem, and it is one of the biggest reasons strategies fail in execution.

Alignment does not mean that everyone has to agree with every decision. In fact, strong leadership teams should challenge assumptions, test the strategy and disagree constructively before important decisions are made. The problem occurs when a decision has been made but the organisation has not genuinely aligned behind it. If people are unclear about what has been decided, why it matters, what their role is, what authority they have and how their performance will be measured, then execution becomes slow and inconsistent. Decisions are revisited, functions begin protecting their own priorities, projects compete for resources and people wait for approval rather than taking ownership. The CEO eventually becomes the escalation point for problems that should have been resolved much closer to where they occur.

I have seen this particularly clearly during periods of growth. Growth creates its own form of organisational complexity because the systems, structures and behaviours that worked when a business was smaller do not necessarily work when the organisation becomes larger. More people are involved in decisions, more functions have competing priorities and the consequences of poor coordination become more significant. A business can continue to grow revenue while simultaneously becoming less efficient, slower to make decisions and increasingly dependent on a small number of executives. At some point, the organisation needs to change the way it operates, not simply set another growth target.

The same principle applies to turnaround situations. When a business is underperforming, there is often an immediate temptation to look for a new strategy, a new market, a new product or another external explanation for the problem. Sometimes those things are necessary, but often the first requirement is much more fundamental. The organisation needs clarity about where value is actually being created and destroyed, which activities matter, which customers and products deserve investment, where costs need to be addressed, who is accountable for the outcomes and how quickly decisions need to be made. In one of the turnarounds I have been involved in, the focus was not simply on developing a new strategic plan. It was on changing the commercial and operational fundamentals of the business so that the strategy could actually produce a different result.

Accountability is another area where organisations frequently confuse activity with performance. People are often given responsibility for initiatives without being given genuine accountability for the outcome. Someone might be responsible for implementing a new system, managing a sales program or improving a process, but that does not necessarily mean they are accountable for whether the investment ultimately creates value. The distinction matters because organisations can become very good at completing projects while remaining remarkably poor at achieving the commercial or organisational outcomes those projects were supposed to deliver.

For every major strategic priority, I believe there should be a very clear answer to three questions:

1. what outcome am I accountable for,

2. by when am I expected to deliver it, and

3. what do I need from the organisation to achieve it?

The third question is particularly important because accountability without authority is often little more than blame waiting to happen. It is unreasonable to hold an executive accountable for an outcome while denying them access to the people, capital, information, systems or decision-making authority required to achieve it. If the organisation genuinely wants the outcome, it has to create the conditions for the person accountable to deliver it.

Culture also plays a much greater role in strategy execution than many leadership teams acknowledge. Culture is often treated as something separate from strategy, but I see culture as one of the mechanisms through which strategy either succeeds or fails. Culture determines how decisions are actually made when nobody is looking at the strategic plan. It determines whether people challenge poor thinking, whether leaders address underperformance, whether teams take ownership, whether executives are prepared to make difficult decisions and whether the organisation rewards outcomes or simply rewards activity.

I have worked in organisations where the stated strategy was ambitious but the culture rewarded caution, where the business wanted rapid growth but its decision-making structures were designed for a much smaller organisation, and where innovation was described as a strategic priority while people were effectively punished whenever an experiment did not work. In each case, the strategy may have been reasonable, but the organisational environment was working against it. Leaders were asking people to behave differently without changing the systems, incentives, authority structures or behaviours that shaped how people actually worked.

Capital allocation provides another useful test of whether a strategy is real. If growth is genuinely the priority, where is the investment going? If customer experience is strategically important, are the people and systems required to improve it being funded? If technology transformation is critical, has the organisation invested not only in the technology but also in the capability and change management required to make it successful? If an organisation is pursuing acquisitions, does it have the management capacity, integration discipline and capital discipline required to turn those acquisitions into value?

Strategy involves choices, and choices involve trade-offs. An organisation cannot pursue everything at once and cannot fund every priority equally. One of the clearest signs that an organisation does not have genuine strategic priorities is when it has twenty things that are described as priorities. In practice, that usually means there are no priorities because everything has been given equal importance. Real strategy requires leaders to decide what matters most, where resources should go and, equally importantly, what the organisation is prepared to stop doing.

This is one of the biggest lessons I have taken from more than two decades working across growth, turnaround, transformation and organisational change. The biggest improvements I have been involved in have rarely come from discovering some extraordinary strategy that nobody had previously considered. More often, they have come from getting much clearer about what matters, aligning the leadership team around those priorities, putting the right people in the right roles, allocating resources behind the areas that can create the greatest value and establishing a disciplined rhythm of execution that keeps the organisation focused on outcomes rather than activity.

That is why I increasingly see the CEO's role as being much more than developing the strategy and communicating it to the organisation. The CEO has to create the conditions in which the strategy can succeed, which means making difficult choices, confronting misalignment, removing organisational obstacles, allocating capital deliberately, changing the operating model when necessary and holding people accountable for outcomes. It also means being prepared to look honestly at the leadership team and the organisation itself when execution is not happening, rather than automatically assuming that the strategic plan must be wrong.

When a strategy is not delivering, my instinct is therefore not to immediately rewrite the strategy. I would first ask whether the organisation is genuinely aligned around the few outcomes that matter most, whether every major priority has one clearly accountable executive, whether those executives have the authority and resources required to deliver, whether the culture and incentives reinforce the strategy, whether capital is being allocated according to stated priorities, whether decisions are being made quickly enough and whether leaders are prepared to make the difficult calls required when performance does not meet expectations.

The answers to those questions will usually tell you much more about the organisation's prospects than another strategic planning workshop. Most organisations do not fail because they lack strategy. They fail because leaders cannot align people, capital, culture and execution around what actually creates value.

That is where I believe the real work of leadership begins. It is not simply about having the right strategy on paper. It is about creating an organisation capable of turning that strategy into measurable progress and, ultimately, sustainable value.

Sometimes the most important strategic question a CEO can ask is not whether the strategy is right, but whether the organisation is actually capable of executing it.

That requires looking beyond the strategy document and, sometimes, looking in the mirror.

If this article resonated with you, let's connect.

Feel free to connect or send me a message on LinkedIn. I enjoy talking with founders, CEOs and business leaders about building high-performing businesses.