Every year a large number of well-run companies approve a strategy that does not happen. The post-mortems tend to reach for the same explanations: poor communication, insufficient buy-in, a culture that resists change. These are not wrong, exactly. They are just downstream of something more concrete.
In most organisations I have worked with, the strategy did not fail because people disagreed with it. It failed because nobody was ever measured on whether it happened.
What gets tracked is whether the plan exists
Consider what actually appears on an executive dashboard in the twelve months after a strategy is approved. Almost invariably: milestone completion, workstream status, budget consumed against plan. All of these measure whether the programme is progressing.
None of them measure whether anyone is behaving differently.
A strategy is not a document. It is a claim about how thousands of small decisions will be made differently next year than they were last year.
If the claim is that your sales organisation will lead with service rather than equipment, then the measurable question is not "has the service playbook been produced?" It is "what proportion of first customer conversations now open with service?" One of those is answerable in a steering committee. The other requires somebody to go and find out.
The three questions worth measuring
When I am asked to review execution, I look for measurement against three things, in this order.
- Has anyone's incentive changed? If the compensation plan is identical to last year, the strategy is a preference, not a priority. This single check predicts execution outcomes better than anything else I have found.
- Has anyone's calendar changed? Executive attention is the scarcest resource in the company. If the executive team spends the same proportion of its time on the same topics as before, nothing has been reprioritised — it has only been added.
- Has anything stopped? Strategies fail more often from addition than from resistance. A plan that asks an organisation to do six new things without removing anything is a plan to do six things badly.
Why this is uncomfortable
These questions are unpopular because they are answerable, and the answers are frequently embarrassing. It is more comfortable to report that the transformation programme is 68% complete than to report that the sales incentive plan still pays on the metric the strategy was meant to move away from.
But the second piece of information is the one that predicts what will happen. The first is a description of activity, and activity has never been the constraint.
A practical starting point
Take your approved strategy and your current compensation plan, and put them side by side on one page. Ask a simple question of each incentive: if an intelligent, self-interested person optimised entirely for this payout, would they advance the strategy or work against it?
In my experience, roughly a third of incentives in a typical company actively work against the stated strategy, and nobody has noticed because the two documents are owned by different functions and reviewed on different cycles.
That exercise takes an afternoon. It is usually the most productive afternoon of the year.