Not because the strategy was wrong. Because the commitments had owners on paper and nobody who would recognise them if you asked on a Tuesday, and because the parts that cross team boundaries belong to no one at all.
Execution failure gets diagnosed as a people problem or a strategy problem. It is usually neither. It is a structural problem with three or four recognisable shapes, and each one has a fix that is unglamorous and cheap.
What the research actually found
Sull, Homkes and Sull published the clearest version of this in Harvard Business Review in 2015, and the findings have aged well because the causes are structural rather than fashionable.
The one worth sitting with: the commitments that fail most are the ones requiring cooperation between units. Not the hard ones. The shared ones. A commitment inside a single team has an owner who feels it. A commitment spanning three teams has three people who each believe one of the others has it.
The second: leaders consistently overestimate alignment. The plan was communicated, so it is assumed to be understood. Communication was confirmed; comprehension was not.
The four shapes
| Failure | What it looks like | What actually fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| No single owner | A commitment assigned to a team, a function or a committee | One name per commitment, no exceptions, even when the work is shared |
| Coordination orphan | The parts that cross teams, owned by nobody | Name the owner of the handoff, not just the two ends |
| Review too slow | Quarterly reviews on a quarterly plan | Fortnightly on commitments, quarterly on the strategy |
| Measure is activity | Progress reported as effort, meetings held, documents produced | A measure that can go down |
The fourth is the quietly corrosive one. When progress is reported as activity, every commitment is permanently on track until the quarter ends and none of them landed. A measure that can only go up is not a measure, it is a narrative.
The test that takes an afternoon
Ask five people at different levels to name the top three priorities for this quarter, without looking them up.
If you get five different answers, the plan was communicated and not understood, and no amount of execution discipline downstream will compensate. If you get the same three, you have an execution problem you can actually work on, which is the better position to be in.
Then ask the owner of any commitment when they last updated it. If the honest answer is "at the last review", the plan is a document rather than a system, and the review is where you find out rather than where you decide.
Why the rhythm matters more than the tooling
A stalled commitment is cheap to fix in week two and expensive in week eleven. Nothing about that is a software problem, and yet it is the thing most execution systems are actually for: making a stall visible early enough that the response is still a choice.
That is the design argument behind Empiraa GPS. One named owner per commitment, progress collected from where the work happens rather than chased by email, and a fortnightly rhythm that surfaces the stall rather than the explanation. For advisory and consulting firms running this on behalf of clients, the same mechanics sit inside GPS for Professional Services, where the plan belongs to the client and the firm can see across every engagement at once.
Where execution is not the problem
Worth being honest about the limit. If the strategy is genuinely wrong, better execution makes you wrong faster. Three signals that the problem is upstream: the commitments are all achievable and none of them would change the business; nobody can say what the company has decided not to do; and the plan has not changed in response to anything that happened in the market.
Execution discipline applied to a plan nobody believes in produces compliance, which looks like progress on a dashboard and costs a year.
What to do on Monday
One name against every commitment. Including the shared ones. Especially the shared ones.
Name the handoffs. For anything crossing a team boundary, the handoff gets its own owner. This is the single highest-return change on the list and almost nobody does it.
Move the review to fortnightly. Shorter, not longer. The point is currency, not depth.
Replace one activity measure with something that can go down. Just one, to see what it tells you.
Related reading: strategy execution best practices that survive a quarter, and what changes about strategy execution above 200 people.
Strategy execution has a definition on this site. See strategy execution software, what the category is and who should not buy one.
