Everyone Wants to Be in the Off-Site Photo. They Disappear When It's Time to Execute.

There's no shortage of strategy in most organisations. There are decks, there are away days, there are carefully articulated visions that the leadership team agreed on over two days in a nice hotel somewhere. The problem is rarely the quality of the thinking. The problem is that very little of it makes it into the lived reality of how the business actually operates.

This isn't a niche observation. Research from PMI's 2025 CEO survey found that 93% of senior executives say they must reinvent their business model or operating approach at least every five years, with nearly two-thirds doing so every two years or more. Yet the single biggest barrier they cited wasn't a lack of ideas, capital, or technology - it was the disconnect between planning and execution. A recent HBR piece from January 2026 described the familiar symptoms well: rising attrition, missed goals, and a growing disconnect between the people setting direction and the people trying to deliver it.

The numbers don't improve when you look at value. McKinsey's 'Organize to Value' research references back to previous research that even high-performing companies have a 30% gap between their strategy's full potential and what is actually delivered - a gap they attribute to shortcomings in how organisations are set up to execute. Bain & Company's work on the same theme, originally published in HBR nearly a decade ago, put it slightly differently: executives say they lose around 40% of their strategy's potential value to breakdowns in execution. The fact that this finding still gets cited today tells you something: the problem hasn't been solved, it's just been talked about. That's not a rounding error. For a mid-size business, that gap represents millions in unrealised growth, not because the strategy was wrong, but because the organisation couldn't convert intent into outcomes.

So why does execution keep getting treated as an afterthought?

Part of it is that strategy carries higher status. It's intellectually stimulating. It involves senior people in rooms making consequential decisions. It produces a document that can be presented to a board. Leaders scramble to be in the away day photo, to be seen shaping the vision. But when it comes to the follow-up session...the unglamorous "how do we actually make this happen?" work... many of those same leaders delegate downward, or worse, quietly brief their teams not to worry because this new direction won't really affect them. Execution, by contrast, is slower, messier, and less visible. It requires sustained attention rather than a single decisive moment. Most leadership teams, if they're honest, would rather commission another strategy review than sit in the discomfort of making the last one actually work.

But the deeper issue is that execution is almost always designed without its most important variable: the people who have to deliver it.

When I talk about people in the context of execution, I don't mean headcount planning. I mean the harder questions. Do the people in this organisation have the capability, the confidence, and the clarity to do what the strategy requires? Are the incentive structures aligned with what you're asking them to prioritise? Are the behaviours that the strategy demands (i.e. collaboration across teams, commercial focus, willingness to work differently) actively supported, or are they assumed to exist because someone wrote them on a slide?

The organisations I've worked with that close the execution gap share a common characteristic: they treat execution as an equal discipline to strategy, not a downstream consequence of it. They design execution plans with the same rigour they apply to strategic analysis. They think about people - capability, behaviour, capacity, motivation - from the outset, not as a workstream to be addressed after the operating model has been drawn. And they measure success by value created, not by milestones completed on a programme plan.

This matters more now than it has in years. Boards and investors, particularly in PE-backed businesses, are increasingly scrutinising execution readiness as a proxy for whether growth is real or fragile. McKinsey found that two-thirds of organisations have redesigned their operating models in the past two years, and half plan to do so again in the next two. A pace of change that reflects how seriously leadership teams are taking the gap between what they promise and what they deliver. The Accordion 2026 CFO Playbook describes this shift plainly: PE firms are underwriting deals with a clear expectation that value creation will come from operational execution, not just strategic positioning.

For service-based businesses in media, advertising, and consulting, this is particularly acute. These are industries built on people. The talent, the craft, the technical expertise, the relationships, the judgment, the creativity. Yet the execution machinery is often inherited from a different era: siloed structures, misaligned incentives, decision-making processes designed for a business the organisation no longer is. The strategy might point toward integration, client-centricity, and speed. The operating reality delivers something else entirely.

The solution isn't another restructure. It's a genuine commitment to treating execution as a craft. One that requires people at the centre, value as the measure, and leadership willing to stay in the work long after the strategy deck has been filed away.

If your strategy is sound but your results aren't following, the gap probably isn't where you think it is. It's not in the plan. It's in the space between the plan and the people who have to make it real.

At Intelio Works, we work with leadership teams to build strategies that are designed for execution from the outset: with people and value creation at the centre of both. Because a strategy that can't be executed isn't a strategy. And execution without strategic clarity is just motion.