Why Do So Many Strategies Fail, and What You Can Actually Do About It

You’ve probably heard some of these symptoms:

• “We have too many priorities.”
• “I’m not sure who’s actually responsible for this.”
• “We didn’t have input into this.”
• “We’re running hard, but I’m not sure we’re running in the right direction.”

These problems start early, in how the plan is built.

Better planning starts with asking the right questions:

• Are we building our plan on facts and input, or on assumptions and politics?
• Are we aligned on a short list of shared enterprise priorities?
• Do people know who is accountable for what?
• Are we clear on what success looks like, and how we’ll measure it across functions?

Approach in Action

At one client, a Cold Storage and 3PL provider experiencing rapid expansion, leadership recognized that their traditional, ad hoc approach to managing operations couldn’t scale with the pace of their growth. Historically, a small group of individuals had made most of the decisions, but as the organization evolved, they needed a more structured, shared approach to strategy.

We partnered with a cross-functional group of leaders to define a focused set of ambitions grounded in their collective insight. Together, we translated those priorities into a clear, actionable roadmap – outlining specific steps, ownership, and success measures that the entire organization could understand and deliver. By involving the people responsible for execution early in the planning process, the strategy felt relevant, owned, and real – not just a slide deck from the top.

Strategy execution isn’t a factory line. External market events influence focus. Priorities shift. Capacity gets stretched. Assumptions prove wrong. And yet, many organizations execute as if nothing should change once the plan is set.

This rigidity creates gaps:

• Priorities conflict, and nobody knows what truly matters
• Teams duplicate work, or miss dependencies entirely
• Decisions are slow — or happen outside the right forums
• Progress is measured by activity, not impact

Better execution practices are cross-functional and flexible. They recognize that the real world is messy and build in ways to adapt on purpose, not by exception.

Approach in Action

At one home services client, the team set clear priorities and budgets at the start of each year – but struggled to adapt as the realities of the business shifted. As new initiatives emerged and capacity tightened, people often lost sight of the original plan and defaulted to working in silos. Cross-functional coordination broke down, and teams found themselves overwhelmed, duplicating efforts or missing critical dependencies.

We helped design a new approach for managing execution in a more adaptive way. Working with department-level leaders, we introduced a rolling two-quarter planning cadence linked to corporate priorities. A shared dashboard made all current and upcoming initiatives visible, helping teams understand what was in flight, assess trade-offs, and make informed decisions about what to pause or reprioritize. This gave leaders the ability to shift focus when needed – without losing alignment or momentum. The result was sharper clarity on where to invest effort, and a shared discipline around capacity and sequencing that held up even as conditions changed.