Where Execution Fails
Many executives I speak with believe that if they design a strong strategy, their management systems will take care of the rest. They assume that if they define the goals, cascade them into the units, and explain the rationale, that behavior will follow.
In practice, this leap rarely works. Especially when the strategies represent a departure from historical practice. Across industries and sectors, the failure rate is staggering: 60–90% of strategies never launch effectively, and up to 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategic plans. It’s not because the ideas were wrong, but because the organization couldn’t translate the plan into new patterns of behavior. That gap is the missing middle.
Unless leaders deliberately design this middle zone, old structures, incentives, relationships, and beliefs will pull the team towards familiar habits. In this article, I’ll explain why that middle matters and how you can build your next strategy with the integrated muscle of planning + behavior.
Why Strategies Fall Apart After the Retreat
Most organizations invest heavily in strategy formation: market scans, competitive benchmarking, SWOTs, financial modeling, and visioning workshops. The deliverables are impressive — powerful narratives, compelling goals, and carefully constructed performance frameworks. But once the plan is announced, leaders assume the machinery — performance reviews, management meetings, dashboards — will drive execution.
That assumption is flawed. Execution is not automatic because control systems don’t override meaning systems. Even the best systems can be undermined if the human system — belief, identity, norms — is misaligned. And if the strategy is a departure from the norm, then internal systems often need to be redesigned.
Sustained behavior change isn’t achieved only with new metrics. People sustain change because:
- the way they see their role evolves
- leaders model new expectations
- they identify with the new strategy and vision
- incentives and norms are redesigned to support new behaviors
- the daily operating rhythm reinforces, not contradicts, the strategy
If these conditions remain unchanged, legacy behaviors dominate, even when everyone agrees intellectually that the new direction is important. Staff feel safer doing “what worked last year,” and leaders revert to firefighting old crises. In such contexts, new goals feel aspirational but not binding. The result is strategies that fade, teams “wait out” the initiative until the next one arrives, skepticism in leadership grows and trust erodes.
This is why many CEOs complain: “We spend so much in planning, yet the follow-through never happens.” The missing middle is the reason.
Designing the Missing Middle
Designing for execution doesn’t replace the essential step of strategy formation. But for strategy to be executed successfully, you have to design for it, and move beyond the big idea at the center of your strategy. Ultimately, the value of strategy lies not in the document, but in how the process engages the team and reshapes thinking and behavior over time.
Our model overlays four major phases — Discover → Align → Activate → Sustain — with a deliberate Middle Zone in which strategy ideas are converted into lived behavior.
1. Discover: Start With Data and Insights
Discover is where classic strategy and Shift’s human-centered approach intersect. Leaders need both. We uncover the forces shaping the future and affecting current performance by integrating:
Traditional strategy tools: market analysis, competitive dynamics, environmental scans, trend analysis
Organizational reality: workflows, capability constraints, resource allocation
Human insight: interviews, listening sessions, ethnographic observation, reframing exercises
Often, the problem leaders thought they needed to solve, or the opportunity to reach for, needs to be reframed and redefined. This stage is not about reviewing PowerPoint slides. Through structured conversations and exercises, assumptions and biases are managed and divergent perspectives are revealed. The outcome is agreement about the root problem to solve for and the latent opportunity to reach for — supported by data and insights.
2. Align: Turn Insight Into Shared Commitment
Alignment is the first half of the Missing Middle. It is the point at which strategy becomes human. Alignment is not consensus and it and it is not compliance. It is not “everyone agrees with the slide.” Strategy is not a democratic process, but it is participatory.
Alignment is shared conviction about:
- Vision and purpose
- What Must Be True for the strategy to succeed
- The behaviors and beliefs leaders must embody
- Roles, ownership, and decision expectations
Shift uses facilitated dialogue, identity statements, narrative frames, and decision architecture to turn strategic logic into shared meaning.
This stage creates:
- A coherent leadership voice
- A unifying narrative that resonates emotionally, not just intellectually
- Real agreements about tradeoffs, priorities, and constraints
- Leaders who can describe the strategy in the same way, with the same level of clarity
Without this, execution becomes fractured. With it, teams begin moving together.
3. Activate: Make Strategy Executable Through Rhythm and Reinforcement
Activate is the second half of the Missing Middle and the part most leaders underestimate. This is where alignment becomes coordinated behavior. Shift designs activation around four levers:
90-Day Goals and Operating Rhythm
We translate strategy into cycles of visible movement — short, concrete goals that build momentum and make progress easy to see.
Accountability Systems
Dashboards and structures that make performance transparent and clarify ownership, decision rights, and collaborative expectations.
Communication Rhythms
Messaging that reinforces progress and meaning, harvesting early wins and reinforcing vision and expectations. .
Tools for Daily Behavior
The Shift Playbook, What Must Be True maps, commitment boards, decision rules, standard agendas — all practical artifacts leaders use, not file away.
This stage builds the linkage between intent and action so that everyone knows who will do what and by when, and why it matters. When this part is missing, people quietly revert to old routines. When it is designed intentionally, new habits take root.
4. Sustain: Turn Momentum Into Culture
Many strategies “launch” but never embed. Sustain ensures the strategy becomes self-reinforcing by becoming part of how the organization thinks and behaves long after the initial energy fades.
Shift sustains through:
- Pulse assessments that measure alignment, readiness, and belief
- Leadership modeling and coaching
- Review rhythms that examine obstacles and adjust plans in real time
- Reinforcement of identity — who we are when we are at our best
- Course corrections that keep teams aligned as conditions shift
Over time, the strategy becomes a pattern, not a project. Like a flywheel, it takes effort to get started but continues under its own momentum.
Illustrative Cases
Once strategies are articulated and launched, management systems to sustain execution are essential. These include cascaded objectives through all layers of management, daily, weekly and monthly performance scorecards, and quarterly business reviews (QBRs). While essential, they are often not sufficient to sustain momentum and motivation for behavior change. After all, they are information, not identity. They address the logical, but not the emotional. Below are two examples of additional initiatives undertaken to achieve and sustain performance.
Designing Systems to Reinforce Group Identity
A health system was launching an Accountable Care Organization, which is an entity separate from the health system and that is accountable for insurance contracts that paid incentives not on the volume of care like the hospital, but on the quality of the outcomes. One goal was to be authentically led by physicians and for these leaders to cultivate engagement of doctors across many small independent primary care practices. We were intentional in designing their work to create and sustain their sense of identity and autonomy, and ultimately accountability.
- The board of the organization was weighted heavily with physician members, especially those not employed by the health system.
- The board avoided including health system executives whose interests were primarily served by the existing model of pay-for-volume.
- To reinforce an independent identity, the group never met in hospital facilities. Board meetings and quarterly provider meetings were held at independent practices or conference facilities.
- Autonomy was given to the physicians to develop care pathways, and to teach and mentor one another on best practices.
The CEO of the health system took risks to allow this level of autonomy, but without it, the group would not have come tougher with the sense of ownership and accountability that ultimately helped them to meet the strategic goals to lower the total cost of care while increasing quality outcomes.
Maintaining Momentum By Connecting to Purpose
An initiative was launched to transform the accountability culture of the leadership team of a regional health system. The focus was on improving patient experience in the hospital system, though the benefits would affect other priorities. The initiative was launched from stories of patient experiences that touched the minds and hearts of system leadership, and momentum was sustained by repeating this process weekly and quarterly.
- At every weekly executive management meeting, a patient testimonial was read aloud by a member of the team. This had a much greater impact than distributing these stories by email. The act of reading aloud the words of a patient created profound personal connections to their experiences.
- At quarterly leadership retreats, a patient was invited to attend in person and kick off the meeting by sharing their story of care received by the hospital team. Care teams are very good at staying connected to their purpose–their patients. But even front line managers can get disconnected. And sharing these stories in person, often with a dozen team members up front who cared for that person sharing their story, transcended the daily obstacles that make work challenging. (Note: credit is due to Quint Studer and the Studer Group for developing and guiding implementation of this type of patient-centered leadership.)
Dashboards, 90-action plans, and QBRs were standard work that supported the desired behavior. These stories — this connection to purpose — maintained the emotional connection to the goal.
Why The Missing Middle Works
When you intentionally design the middle, several things shift:
- Resistance drops because change becomes meaningful, not imposed
- Ownership rises because leaders help shape the commitments
- Confusion declines because roles and expectations are explicit
- Momentum builds because reinforcing structures are in place
- Culture shifts because behavior becomes consistent
This layered design means your operational systems (dashboards, meetings, scorecards) become amplifiers of aligned behavior.
Closing the Gap
Strategy success doesn’t come from a single deployment. It comes from skillfully navigating the middle ground where people convert ideas into action.Strategy formation is necessary but insufficient. The missing middle is where strategy comes to life from the paper it’s written on and becomes the lived logic of your organization.
Want to explore the best path for addressing your next major strategy?
