Credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash Somewhere in your organisation, right now, a team is making a decision. A product prioritisation call, a budget reallocation, a hiring choice, a client proposal. The people making it are smart, experienced, and acting in good faith. There is a fair chance they are making it with no idea what the company’s strategy says about this exact question.
A benchmark study of 180 strategy and operations leaders at companies of 50 to 200 employees, run by OKRs Tool with none of its own customers in the sample, found that 86% of those leaders say most of their people cannot name the company’s top priorities. Not summarise them. Not connect them to their work. Name them.
Only 7% said most of the work in their organisation ladders up to a stated priority, and 83% get no automatic signal when their work starts drifting from the plan. The strategy exists. The organisation is executing something else. This Is Not a Communication Problem The instinct, faced with data like this, is to call it a communication failure.
Leadership didn’t cascade the strategy clearly enough. The all-hands wasn’t sticky enough. The internal newsletter went unread. So the fix becomes more communication: better slides, more frequent all-hands, clearer messaging from the top.
None of it works, because communication was never the problem. Infrastructure is. A strategy that lives in a slide deck is a broadcast, not a system. It reaches the people who were in the room and fades within weeks for everyone else.
Meanwhile the decisions that actually determine whether strategy happens (which features to build, which clients to prioritise, which hires to make this quarter) get made in tools and conversations that have no connection to the strategic document at all. The organisation absorbs the broadcast, nods along, and gets on with whatever was already in the calendar. Execution isn’t a cultural property. It’s a structural one.
The companies that execute well have built systems that keep strategy visible at the level where decisions actually get made. The ones that don’t have made a structural mistake and spent years calling it a cultural failure. The Accountability Gap Nobody Talks About The study surfaces something worse than the awareness number. 60% of leaders said that when a priority goes off track, it is never cleanly resolved. 39% said failing priorities simply vanish: no decision, no escalation, no acknowledgment. They stop being discussed, then stop being tracked, and eventually stop being anyone’s job.
Ambition wasn’t the issue. The strategy was real and the intent to execute it was genuine. What’s missing is a mechanism that makes the off-track state visible while it can still be corrected, rather than weeks later in a review when the quarter is already shaped. The review cadence most organisations run, monthly at best and quarterly for anything strategic, is far too slow to catch drift before it compounds.
By the time a failing priority surfaces in a leadership review, it has often been drifting for weeks. In the study, 21% of leaders said a priority is typically off track for a month or more before they personally know. The decision to intervene has already become a decision to recover, and recovery is a harder problem than course correction. AI Makes This Worse Before It Makes It Better There is a wave of AI-assisted strategy work going on inside organisations right now.
Strategy documents drafted with AI. Goal frameworks generated from prompts. Planning sessions augmented by language models that spit out structured outputs faster than any facilitated workshop could. Almost none of it touches the structural problem.
An AI-generated strategy nobody can name is no better than a human-written one nobody can name. An AI-assisted planning session that produces goals nobody tracks is not progress. The speed at which strategy gets created was never the constraint. The system that connects it to the work is.
AI does have a real role here, and it sits in the monitoring layer: watching goal progress through the quarter, flagging drift early, surfacing misalignment before it goes invisible. That is almost never where organisations are pointing it. They are pointing it at the creation stage, where the problem is mild, and leaving the execution stage, where the problem does the damage, exactly as broken as it was. What a Working System Looks Like The 17% of organisations in the study that do get an automatic signal when work drifts aren’t doing anything exotic.
In my experience, organisations like these run a goal management process with three properties most others lack. First, goals are set at every level (company, team, individual) with explicit links between them, so the relationship between a team’s quarterly objective and the company’s priority is built in rather than assumed. Second, progress is tracked continuously, not reconstructed at the review. The gap between those two is enormous.
A goal updated every week by the person accountable for it gives you a current, honest picture. A goal reconstructed at the quarter-end review gives you a rationalisation of what already happened. They are not the same artefact, and treating them as interchangeable is how leadership teams end up surprised by their own numbers. Third, an off-track goal triggers a response every single time: a revision, an escalation, a reallocation of resources.
The 39% silent-disappearance rate exists because most companies have no standing rule for what happens when a goal goes red. The low-drift organisations do, and they enforce it. The Structural Bet Worth Making Better AI, better communication, or better leadership will not solve the strategy execution problem. Organisations that decide to treat execution as an infrastructure question and build for it will solve it.
In practice that means three things. Goal management software that keeps priorities visible inside the tools people already use every day. A weekly review cadence that catches drift before it compounds. And ownership rules with no ambiguity in them: one named person per goal, and a clear definition of what accountability means when something goes wrong. 61% of the companies in the study are running their strategy on spreadsheets, documents, a general project tool, or nothing central at all.
The ones competing against them, the ones that built the execution infrastructure, are catching misalignment in week four instead of week twelve. That is a compounding advantage, and it shows up in every quarter and every year the gap stays open. The strategy was never the problem. It never is.
Steven Macdonald is the founder of OKRs Tool, goal-setting software for growing companies. Contributed article. Not produced by the TNW newsroom and does not reflect the editorial stance of TNW.
Leave a Reply