Why Your Strategy Never Makes It Past the Deck
And how to apply the 4 C Model to ensure executional effectiveness
You had the meeting. You cleared your calendar. You got the big brains in the room and aligned around the boldest version of the future.
The strategy made sense, and your objectives were sharp. This was possibly your best strategic session yet - the narrative was tight enough to win over the board, energise the team and secure those resources you need.
But six months later, reality looks very different.
Execution has stalled. Priorities have drifted. No one’s quite sure who owns what. And that once-powerful strategy? It’s collecting dust in a shared folder no one opens.
This my friend, is the execution gap.
It’s the chasm between vision and velocity and between what leaders hope will happen and what teams are actually doing.
The execution gap is never a failure of intent - it’s a failure of translation and discipline.
Up to 40% of strategy value is lost here. Not because the plan was flawed, but because it never really stood a chance.
This article is about why.
What are the blind spots that undermine execution?
What are the leadership behaviours and cultural patterns that slow you down?
And what is the real test of whether your strategy is actually working?
Spoiler: if it’s not changing behaviour, it’s not strategy.
What the Numbers Won’t Show
On the surface, everything appears to be fine. You’ve got the plan. The KPIs are defined. The all-hands meeting went well. Teams nodded in agreement. Brilliant!
Except it’s not, because strategy doesn’t fall apart in the boardroom. It unravels in the day-to-day.
It fails when teams don’t know which priorities matter most, when departments pursue parallel goals under different assumptions. When managers can’t explain how quarterly targets link back to the company strategy. When no one wants to be the one to admit they’re confused.
That’s the part the metrics don’t show.
And it’s precisely where the value starts leaking.
The strategy–execution gap isn’t always dramatic, and it rarely looks like chaos. Often, it feels like a slow drift. Lots of business and high energy without any focus, lots of delivery without direction and lots of movement but very little momentum.
It shows up in missed opportunities, such as delayed launches. Internal churn. Conflicting initiatives that dilute effort. Projects that hit deadlines but miss the point.
And slowly, it becomes normal.
When that happens, you don’t just lose traction, but you lose your best talent, too. High performers won’t stick around in organisations where ambition isn’t matched by alignment and where decisions are made but yet never fully owned.
That’s the true cost of poor execution: it eats your credibility from the inside out. And as the marketing leader, that’s on you.
By the time the numbers catch up, you’re already too far behind.
Strategy is Still Treated as a Linear Exercise
Most organisations still approach strategy like a Gantt chart.
Step one: gather insight.
Step two: agree the plan.
Step three: launch and deliver.
Step four: review at the end of the quarter, or worse, the end of the year.
It’s predictable and totally disconnected from how growth actually works in a volatile, uncertain and changing environment.
This linear mindset originates from an era characterised by certainty, lengthy planning cycles, and top-down control. It assumes that if you can just define the perfect roadmap, the rest will fall into place.
But the reality is that roadmaps don’t often survive contact with the market.
Customers don’t follow your narrative, competitors don’t wait their turn and teams don’t always interpret the strategy the same way. And the market you scoped in Q1 could look wildly different by Q3.
So what do most organisations do? They double down. They stick to the original plan out of fear of seeming indecisive. They focus on delivery over relevance. They measure outputs, not outcomes. Busy, busy, busy.
It’s a strategy delivered with stubbornness.
And while you’re busy executing a beautiful plan that no longer fits the world, your competitors are adapting faster, learning in real time, and winning by iteration.
Strategy, done properly, is a cycle of decisions, action, reflection, and adjustment. It’s not what gets announced at the annual offsite but what gets re-evaluated on the ground, week by week.
Until leaders let go of the fantasy that strategy is a one-time decision and execution is merely follow-through, they’ll continue to confuse motion with momentum.
The teams that win don’t just plan better. They evolve faster.
A Modern Strategy Cycle: The Loop, Not the Line
If strategy is about deciding where to play and how to win, then execution is about making that decision real, every day, at every level.
Which is exactly why the old, linear view of strategy no longer works.
Strategy today must be treated as a living system. Not a sequence of steps, but a continuous loop that allows teams to stay responsive, focused, and in sync as conditions evolve.
That loop is made up of four phases: this is my 4D framework.