Strategy execution · 5 min read
Strategy doesn’t fail in the boardroom. It breaks in the day-to-day.
The strategy is approved. The deck is beautiful. Six months later, most people are still doing the same work in the same way.
70%
of corporate transformations fail.
McKinsey & Company, “Why do most transformations fail?”
McKinsey points to three causes: leaders who don’t set a high enough bar, teams without the capability or the time to do the work, and no structure to track whether change is actually happening. None of them are solved by a better slide.
A corporate bank we worked with was already rolling out new asset-finance technology. Their own brief said it plainly: technology alone is insufficient. The platform would match the market. The experience around it was what would grow the book.
That’s the pattern we see most. The system changes. The service, the roles and the habits around it stay the same, and the new system quietly inherits the old problems.
For one payments company’s AI strategy, the team scored 68 opportunities. Only 27 made the roadmap, split into three waves: do now, do next, do later. Each use case had a named owner. The other 41 stayed in a backlog, to be reviewed as capability grows.
Saying no to 41 good ideas is what made the other 27 real.
We test products with real users before building them. Change deserves the same treatment. When a culture programme depended on a new OKR rhythm, it was tried with a small group first, refined, then rolled out to everyone.
The small test surfaces the questions a launch can’t survive: who owns this, what do I stop doing, and how will anyone know it’s working?
If the answer to any of these is no, the strategy isn’t finished yet. It’s still a promise.
The Promise-to-Proof Diagnostic shows where your promise holds, where it breaks and what to change first.
