Breaking the 70% Barrier: Implementing Successful Strategies

Imagine this: your leadership team has spent months crafting a bold new strategy. The plan is airtight, the goals are ambitious yet achievable, and you’ve invested in the best tools to bring it to life. Fast forward a year, and not only has the transformation stalled, but your organization faces confusion, disengaged employees, and unmet goals.

Sound familiar? Research consistently shows that 70% of corporate strategies fail—not because of bad ideas, but because organizations struggle to execute effectively (1,2). Breaking through this cycle begins with addressing the real culprit: how strategies are executed. So, how do you beat the odds? By understanding why many strategies falter in the first place and embracing practices that set successful transformations apart.

It's Not Your Strategy, It's Your Execution

Strategies fail when execution falters. Appreciating the common challenges to execution—often rooted in natural human resistance to change—is critical to delivering a successful strategy. Here are five common pitfalls and what you can do to address each:

1. Create a Compelling Vision

A clear, inspiring vision is essential. Without it, employees lack connection and fail to see their role in the new environment. While the strategy may resonate in the boardroom—where context and motives have been meticulously shaped—it may not speak to your teams in the same way. Creating and communicating a compelling vision—one that includes a sense of urgency and a clear roadmap—helps employees see the bigger picture and their role within it. Take time to understand the hopes and dreams of your employees and connect the vision to their world.

2. Build a Guiding Coalition

Even the most seasoned executives can’t do it alone. While leadership buy-in is crucial, forming a coalition of respected, influential change leaders ensures the strategy gains ground from day one. These change leaders—trusted peers within your workforce—propel the strategy from the ground up, building trust and momentum. Employees need to hear from leadership, but they’re more likely to engage when they see peers actively championing the change.

3. Invest in Strategy Development

Strategy creation is where firms are most flexible, yet many fail to account for informal and political dynamics within their organization. Understanding these often-overlooked cultural elements helps executives craft culturally informed strategies that are more likely to succeed. Early alignment among teams and rigorous testing of ideas reduce the risk of costly operational disruptions later. The more time you invest in development, the more you can fine-tune the strategy to avoid roadblocks down the line.

4. Adapt Execution to Reality

No strategy is bulletproof, and even the best plans need to pivot. Yet overly optimistic planning—what Kahneman and Tversky call the Planning Fallacy (3)—can derail execution. While traditional transformation metrics focus on timelines and milestones, successful transformations also measure sentiment and adoption rates. By tracking these metrics and running controlled experiments, managers can adjust tactics early and scale what works. Adaptive execution ensures you’re not only on schedule but genuinely engaging employees in meaningful ways.

5. Align Strategy with Cultural Artifacts

Strategy and culture must evolve together. Adapting cultural norms—like incentives, behaviors, and shared values—creates an environment where employees actively champion change. An organization’s culture may seem obvious to insiders, but it’s notoriously hard to define and even harder to change. Aligning strategy to culture (and vice versa) fosters an environment where transformation becomes part of the everyday fabric.

Taking the First Step Toward Lasting Change

Breaking the 70% failure rate begins today—with your organization’s commitment to execution. A well-constructed strategy is just the starting point; its success lies in how it’s brought to life. The good news? By addressing common execution challenges, you can significantly reduce the financial and emotional costs of stalled transformations.

Revisiting our imagined scenario, picture this instead: A year after launching your strategy, employees are excited about the future. When inevitable challenges arise, teams rally together to solve them, driving the vision forward. Your organization is now more nimble, responsive, and engaged, with employees taking ownership of the transformation. And you—as a decision-maker—have not only avoided common pitfalls but fostered a culture of innovation and resilience.

A culturally informed strategy is easier than you think. It’s worth investing the time to understand your organization’s cultural dynamics and leverage them to accelerate change. By aligning strategy with execution, you’ll not only increase the odds of success but achieve critical mass—the point where transformation becomes self-sustaining.

Now is the time to move from strategy to reality. If you’d like to see these ideas in action, explore our recent case studies—like how one healthcare organization identified informal leaders to accelerate change. Make your vision actionable, adapt where necessary, and foster a culture that thrives on transformation. It’s time to break the 70% barrier.

References:

1. Kotter, John: Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail

2. McKinsey: Losing From Day One

3. Kahneman and Tversky: Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk