Why Good Strategies Fail After They Are Agreed
Over the past thirty years I've facilitated many strategic planning sessions.
The work is usually energising. Leadership teams debate the issues, agree priorities and leave the room with a genuine sense of purpose.
The strategy is clear, and people are keen to get started.
My involvement often continues after the workshop. Together we build a project plan from the agreed priorities and regularly review progress.
That is where things often become interesting.
The new projects are discussed and updated, but many struggle to gain momentum.
Existing work continues much as before.
The same meetings stay in the diary, the same reports are produced and the same operational pressures demand attention.
New priorities have been added to the workload, while very little of the old work has been removed.
Over time I came to realise that organisations rarely struggle to decide what to start. They struggle to decide what to stop.
Looking back, that pattern has repeated itself often enough that I no longer see strategy as ending when agreement is reached.
Recent research helps explain why. McKinsey studied the strategy practices of more than four hundred companies and
found that the biggest difference between stronger and weaker organisations emerged after the strategic choices had been made.
The gap lay in how effectively those choices were translated into ownership, planning, resource allocation and coordinated action.
Agreement sets the direction, but the organisation only begins to change when ownership, resources and everyday work move with it.
The work between strategy and execution
Strategy is often described as moving from planning to execution.
There is an important stage in between.
People need to know who owns each priority. Budgets need to reflect the choices that have been made. Resources have to move.
Measures need to change. Just as importantly, work that no longer supports the strategy needs to stop.
McKinsey found that organisations delivering stronger results were better at turning broad strategic choices
into specific initiatives and embedding those initiatives into operating plans and budgets.
This explains why a strategy can appear successful immediately after launch while everyday work remains largely unchanged.
I remember working with a company in the meat industry where access to livestock was one of its biggest operational challenges.
Animals would sometimes be transported past one meat works and taken many miles further to another plant owned by the same company
because each site was working to its own targets. The receiving plant achieved its local objectives,
but the wider business carried the additional transport costs and lost much of the efficiency the strategy was intended to deliver.
The strategy was sound. The measures driving day-to-day decisions were not.
People generally respond to the measures, incentives and expectations they experience every day.
Leadership priorities become organisational priorities
Where leaders invest time and resources tells people what really matters.
McKinsey's January 2026 research found that the strongest economic performers made larger year-to-year shifts in funding across business units,
markets and major initiatives than their peers.
They aligned investment with the choices they had made instead of spreading resources evenly across existing activities.
The same principle applies to leadership attention.
Every meeting a senior leader attends, every report they request and every question they ask reinforces particular priorities.
A leadership team may genuinely support a new strategic direction while continuing to spend most of its time reviewing yesterday's operations.
The strategy remains important in theory, but everyday leadership reinforces something different.
People notice these signals. They see where experienced team members are assigned,
which projects receive funding and what senior leaders continue asking about.
Those observations influence behaviour far more than a presentation from the strategy day.
Changing this often requires leaders to let go of familiar territory. Some established reports receive less attention.
Some meetings disappear altogether. Time is deliberately redirected towards the work that will shape the organisation's future.
New priorities require trade-offs
One of the hardest parts of implementation is deciding what will stop.
Most organisations are comfortable adding new initiatives.
Far fewer are comfortable removing old ones.
Existing work has history, supporters and often continuing value.
Closing projects or simplifying routines can feel uncomfortable, particularly when people have invested time and effort in creating them.
Yet every additional priority consumes capacity.
When nothing is removed, strategy simply becomes another layer of work.
Effective implementation discussions therefore need to go beyond asking what will begin.
They also need to decide which projects will finish, where resources will be reassigned and which meetings,
reports or processes no longer justify the time they consume.
Without those decisions, managers are left to resolve competing priorities themselves.
Immediate operational demands usually win because their consequences are immediate and visible.
Managers make strategy real
Senior leaders set the direction, while managers translate it into the choices made during an ordinary working week.
They decide what receives attention during busy periods,
whether development conversations survive operational pressure and when improvement work is postponed.
Those decisions accumulate.
A manager who regularly asks about progress on customer improvements signals that the work matters.
Another who repeatedly cancels improvement meetings because operations are busy sends a different message,
even if they fully support the strategy.
Managers need enough authority to make genuine trade-offs.
Holding them accountable for new priorities while expecting every previous responsibility
to remain unchanged rarely produces meaningful change.
Looking for evidence of movement
Many strategy reviews focus on milestones and communication.
It is equally important to look at what has changed across the organisation.
A useful review looks for practical signs of movement. Resources have been reassigned. Measures now reflect the new direction.
Leadership discussions focus on different issues. Old work has ended to create capacity for new priorities.
Taken together, these changes show whether the organisation is reshaping itself around the strategy or simply adding another layer of activity.
Good strategies rarely fail because people disagree with them.
More often they fail because the organisation continues behaving exactly as it did before.
Agreement is only the beginning.
A strategy starts to influence results when leaders reshape attention, resources and everyday work around the choices they have already made.
References
Krell, A., D'Amico, A., West, A., Diedrich, D., Birshan, M., Zimmerman, W. & Montard, A. (2025).
How Strategy Champions Win. McKinsey & Company, 14 July 2025.
West, A., LaBerge, L. & Banholzer, M. (2026).
How Top Economic Performers Lean into Their Competitive Advantage to Guide Their Strategy. McKinsey & Company, 30 January 2026.