Strategy Execution: the roles involved, and where work can stall.

By Jim Wilde, Emergent Skills

The situation

The strategy was approved. What happened to the work?

Consider a familiar situation: a priority appears in the company plan and the departmental objectives, but a milestone keeps slipping. One team is waiting for a decision. Another has returned the work for clarification. Both need the same specialist. Those observations give you places to look. They do not yet tell you why the result is late.

Execution requires more than announcing objectives. NIST’s Baldrige guidance connects action plans with resources, workforce plans, aligned work processes and performance measures. Its framework also calls for adapting plans when conditions change. Read the NIST guidance.

In research published in January 2026, Bain surveyed nearly 1,000 executives and employees who had experienced a reorganization. Eighty-eight percent of leaders expected the new structure to achieve its goals; 36 percent of employees agreed. These are confidence measures, not a measurement of execution loss or proof of its cause. Bain also emphasizes workflow clarity, decision rights, training, coaching and tools. Read Bain’s findings.

ES does not assume the work path is the cause. We check the result and its prerequisites, whether necessary work was identified and assigned, where work is getting stuck, whether conditions around execution are contributing to errors or rework, and other plausible explanations the evidence supports. The broader question remains open: why projects fail and what to check first.

The role map

Eleven roles. Different responsibilities. Shared dependencies.

This is an illustrative responsibility map, not an eleven-step approval chain or a complete reporting chart. Companies combine titles and assign authority differently. Board oversight, commercial leaders, product leaders and control functions also matter. A particular result may involve only some of these roles.

Every group contributes to execution. The colors distinguish areas of emphasis. Select a role to see its contribution and a question to investigate. The failure descriptions are possibilities to check, not findings about everyone who holds that title.

The question across these roles is who can resolve a dependency when it crosses their boundaries. Bain’s RAPID framework distinguishes the people who recommend, provide input, agree to required conditions, decide and implement. A job title alone does not settle those responsibilities. Read Bain’s decision-role guidance.

Use the evidence you already have

A status report is a starting point for a trace.

Work-management tools can contain useful evidence. Jira’s control chart, for example, reports time spent in selected workflow statuses and can account for reopened work. The available view depends on the workflow and recorded data. See Atlassian’s documentation.

For one result, ask whether the available record covers the relevant decisions and handoffs, including work outside the system. Compare it with the accounts of the people involved. Mark missing or disputed steps as uncertain. A diagram reconstructed from memory is a working account to check, not a complete audit.

Completing the deliverable is also different from realizing its intended benefit. PMI’s benefits-management framework connects projects with strategic benefits that must be delivered and sustained. A route that moves faster still needs to produce a usable result. Read the PMI framework.

Before changing the route

Check the result and its conditions first.

These are ES screening questions. They help decide what to investigate and should be considered for every result, whatever the questionnaire below returns.

1. Outcome: Is the intended result clear, still useful and measurable?
2. Priority: Is it still a chosen commitment, and what should give way when work conflicts?
3. Means: Are the necessary skills, staffing capacity, information, tools, funding and authority available?
4. External dependencies: Is a customer, supplier, partner or other outside condition setting the pace?

A gap in any of these can explain part of the delay. It may coexist with friction in the work path. Record it rather than forcing a choice between a people explanation and a process explanation. Also check whether all the work needed to produce the result was identified and assigned to a named owner.

If execution remains in scope, ES then examines two execution routes, which can occur separately or interact. They are part of the investigation, not the whole investigation. Route 1 is the work path. Work waits in an approval queue, comes back for another review or sits behind a specialist with conflicting commitments. The people involved can all be working well and the result is still late. The four questions below look for this kind of evidence.

Route 2 asks whether surrounding demands, such as interruptions, frequent switching or competing decisions, contribute to errors, reversed decisions, rework or missed handoffs. These demands can arise independently of a work-path problem or interact with one. Being busy or interrupted alone is not proof; the evidence must connect the demand to an observable execution failure. When a capacity effect is suspected, ES uses the Four Tests: baseline shift, load signature, shared conditions and reversibility. Reversibility requires evidence from changed conditions. A work-path finding can stand without a Route 2 finding.

One result to examine

Which result would you least like to explain at the next review?

Choose one milestone, decision or deliverable that should have moved. The questions below collect observations. A yes identifies something to examine; it does not establish a bottleneck or justify removing a control. A no does not rule a work-path problem out.

Test one explanation

Change a specific condition and examine the result.

Suppose work repeatedly waits for the next review meeting. A proposed experiment might give a named decision-maker a scheduled review slot, with complete inputs and clear acceptance criteria. The relevant owner must authorize the change and preserve required controls.

For a 14-day experiment, agree the baseline, the change, the measure and a decision rule. Check that enough relevant work will pass through the step during that period. Compare waiting and completion with quality, rework and any other changes in demand or staffing.

If performance improves, that supports the explanation that the changed condition contributed. It does not establish that skill, incentives or other factors played no part. If performance does not improve, revisit the hypothesis, implementation and observation period. The result may weaken a specific explanation or remain inconclusive.

What the delay costs

Separate elapsed waiting from extra labor.

Elapsed waiting

How long the result waited between relevant events. This is a duration; it is not automatically paid labor or lost revenue.

Extra labor

Time spent chasing, repeating reviews, correcting avoidable errors or restarting work. Use supported time estimates and identify any uncertainty.

Financial effect

Estimate extra labor cost using an agreed rate. Treat delayed cash, lost margin and other consequences separately, only where the evidence supports them. Do not count the same loss twice.

A shorter wait can be useful even when a reliable financial estimate is not available. The read should say what is known, what is estimated and what remains unresolved.

Where this connects

Follow the question the evidence raises.

Explore the manager’s workload in Span of Control, unresolved decisions in Slow Decision-Making, or conflicts between commitments in Competing Priorities. The Five Capacity Taxes provide ES’s vocabulary for examining related costs.

If similar observations appear across a team or operation, the Work Demand Diagnostic examines the wider pattern. The next step follows the evidence from the first result.