Ian Kiryowa
Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern in leadership conversations. You’ll hear two senior leaders discussing the same organisation, under the same leadership and with access to the same strategic direction. Yet after a few minutes, it’s clear they’re making decisions from completely different reference points.
Neither is incompetent nor acting in bad faith. They’re simply working from different interpretations of the organisation’s direction.
That’s when I realised that one of the biggest reasons strategy fails has nothing to do with the strategy itself. It has everything to do with interpretation.
You see, every organisation starts with a strategic direction that’s captured in a strategic plan, transformation agenda or set of strategic priorities.
That idea is supposed to become everyone’s but the moment it leaves the boardroom, translation begins. The CEO’s ambition becomes an executive objective. The executive objective becomes a departmental plan. The departmental plan becomes a team KPI. Eventually, it becomes someone’s Monday morning task. Every handover introduces room for interpretation.
HR begins thinking about talent. Finance decides where resources should go. Marketing focuses on customer adoption. Sales pursues growth. Operations, Legal, IT and Customer Experience each pick up a different piece of the puzzle.
When that translation is done well, every department moves in the same direction, even though they’re doing different things. But when it isn’t, every department still works hard, but towards its own version of success.
It isn’t a competence problem.
It’s an alignment problem.
The organisations that execute best aren’t always the ones with the smartest strategy. They’re usually the ones where the CEO, the Head of Department and the person answering the front desk all have the same understanding of where the organisation is going and why their role matters.
A strategy isn’t complete because it has been approved by the Board or printed in a glossy document. It’s complete when the most junior employee can explain how today’s work contributes to tomorrow’s ambition.
Many organisations assume that alignment happens naturally yet in reality it doesn’t. Someone has to own the discipline of strategic alignment.
Someone has to keep translating the vision into priorities, decisions, behaviours and measures of success. Someone has to spot when departments begin optimising for themselves. Without that discipline, strategy slowly stops being organisational strategy and becomes a collection of departmental plans.
So here’s the question I’d leave every leadership team with…
Who, in your organisation, is responsible for protecting strategic alignment once the strategy has been launched?
If the answer is “everyone,” there’s a good chance it’s no one. Because strategy rarely fails in the boardroom. It fails in translation.
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