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.
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:
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 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.
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.
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:
Shift uses facilitated dialogue, identity statements, narrative frames, and decision architecture to turn strategic logic into shared meaning.
This stage creates:
Without this, execution becomes fractured. With it, teams begin moving together.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
When you intentionally design the middle, several things shift:
This layered design means your operational systems (dashboards, meetings, scorecards) become amplifiers of aligned behavior.
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?