The Boardroom Autopsy
Every failed project gets a postmortem. And every postmortem tells the same story.
The market shifted. The tech stack was wrong. The timeline was unrealistic. The team wasn't ready.
I've sat in enough of those rooms to know the truth: the plan rarely kills projects. Leaders do.
The Formula You Should Tape to Your Monitor
Garry Ridge spent 25 years as CEO of WD-40. When he started, the company had a market cap of $300 million. When he left, it was $3.5 billion. Employee engagement sat above 90% and 98% of employees said they'd recommend working there.
He's thought a lot about why organisations succeed or fail at executing their strategies. His formula is simple.
Strategy x Will = Results.
Not Strategy + Will. Multiplication. If the will is zero, the result is zero. A brilliant strategy with no will behind it delivers nothing. A mediocre strategy with total organisational commitment delivers results.
"Will" here doesn't mean an inspiring speech at the all-hands. It doesn't mean a values poster in the breakroom. It means the organisation genuinely wants to make this work... and the leader's daily behaviour proves it.
The Numbers Are Damning
Harvard Business Review found that 67% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution. Not bad strategies. Well-formulated ones. The analysis was right. The execution wasn't.
Kaplan and Norton put the number higher: up to 90% of strategies don't get executed successfully.
Here's the part worth sitting with: 85% of leadership teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy. Half spend no time at all.
And only 5% of employees understand their company's strategy.
Think about what those numbers together mean. Leaders spend weeks building the strategy. They present it. They call it done. Then they go back to calendars packed with meetings having nothing to do with it.
If you're not spending time on your strategy, your team isn't either. They notice. They adjust their behaviour accordingly. And six months later, you hold a postmortem about execution failure.
Tech Makes This Worse
In software engineering, we have a particular obsession with the plan.
The architecture document. The roadmap. The OKRs. The quarterly planning session where you move sticky notes around a virtual board for three hours and call it strategy.
We're good at making artefacts. We're less interested in follow-through.
I've watched companies mandate agile and then see senior leaders demand Gantt charts. I've seen engineering roadmaps crafted over weeks, blown up because a VP overheard something on a sales call. I've watched digital transformation programmes where the CTO announced a new platform strategy and then went right back to approving the same technical decisions they'd been making for years.
70% of digital transformations fail. Not because the technology was wrong. Not because the engineers didn't know their work. Because the leaders didn't change their behaviour to match the strategy.
Your team watches what you do, not what you say. When your behaviour doesn't match the strategy, they learn the strategy is decorative.
The Cascade of Disengagement
Here's what happens after a leader signals, through their behaviour, the strategy isn't real.
The senior team adjusts. They start hedging their commitments. They keep one foot in the old way of working. They don't invest fully in the new direction because they've seen this before.
Middle management watches the senior team and does the same. They stop pushing their teams hard on the strategic priorities because they sense the commitment isn't there.
Individual contributors pick this up fast. They're often the most attuned to organisational reality. They stop volunteering for strategic work and focus on the things they know get rewarded.
And then, six months later, leadership looks at the numbers and says: "The strategy isn't working."
The strategy was working fine. The leadership stopped believing in it, and the whole organisation felt it, layer by layer.
What "Will" Looks Like in Practice
Will isn't a speech. It's a pattern of decisions.
If your strategy says you're investing in platform reliability, but every sprint planning meeting gets hijacked by feature requests from sales... the team knows the strategy is fiction.
If your strategy says you're moving to microservices, but you keep approving monolithic changes because the migration is taking longer than expected... the team knows you've mentally abandoned it.
If your strategy says engineering quality comes first, but you override your tech lead every time a deadline is at risk... the team knows what you believe.
The will is visible in the choices you make when the strategy costs you something. Anyone commits to a plan when it's easy. The test is what happens when keeping to the plan is inconvenient.
Ridge called this "care, candor, accountability and responsibility." Leaders who build will in their teams don't just talk about the strategy... they model it. They make it visible. They hold themselves accountable first, before holding their teams accountable.
WD-40 ended up with 97% of employees saying they respected their coach. This requires consistently closing the gap between what leadership says and what leadership does.
The Comfortable Lie
There's a comfortable lie in most organisations: the quality of the strategy determines the outcome.
This lets everyone off the hook. If the plan fails, write a better plan. Hire a consultancy. Run another planning workshop. Buy another tool.
This is why strategy decks are 80 slides long and execution plans are half a page.
We invest in the thing we're comfortable with: thinking. We under-invest in the thing that's hard: changing our own behaviour.
Harvard Business Review found that 61% of executives feel unprepared for strategic challenges when they move into senior roles. They know how to do the work. They haven't learned how to create the conditions for other people to do the work.
The actual job isn't the strategy. It's the conditions.
Three Checks Before Your Next All-Hands
If you're about to present a strategy, or if you're six months into one not moving, run through these.
1. What decisions have you made this month that cost you something?
Keeping to a strategy when it's convenient proves nothing. Find a decision where the strategy required you to say no to something you'd normally say yes to. If you find none, you haven't committed.
2. Does your team know the strategy without looking at a document?
If only 5% of employees understand the company strategy, the odds are yours are in the 95%. Not a communication problem. A repetition problem. You said it once. You needed to say it forty times, in forty contexts, in forty different ways.
3. Are you reviewing strategy monthly, or quarterly at best?
If leadership spends less than an hour a month on strategy, execution drifts. Block the time. Treat it as your most important recurring meeting. It is.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
Your strategy is fine.
The market analysis is solid. The OKRs are well-written. The roadmap makes sense. The team is capable.
The question is whether you believe in it enough to let it change how you spend your time, what you say no to, and what you hold yourself accountable for... not your team.
Strategy x Will = Results.
If your results aren't where you need them, don't rewrite the strategy first. Look at the will. Look in the mirror.
If you want to think more about this from a people leadership angle, I write about it regularly on Step It Up HR.