Strategic audit: revealing the invisible gaps between strategy and the field

What research says about the strategy execution gap

The gap between the strategy that is decided and the strategy that is actually applied isn't a consultant's hunch. It is documented.

In 2015, Donald Sull (MIT Sloan) and Rebecca Homkes (London Business School) published in Harvard Business Review the results of a survey of around 11,000 senior executives, leaders and managers in more than 400 companies. Their findings are striking:

• only a third of managers could correctly name their company's top three priorities;
• even with five attempts, only around half could name the same single top priority;
• among those involved in developing the strategy, barely more than half managed it;
• managers said they could rely on colleagues in other departments "all of the time" in less than 10% of cases.

Two years earlier, an Economist Intelligence Unit survey for the Project Management Institute, covering 587 executives, reached a similar conclusion: 61% admitted their firms struggled to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and day-to-day implementation.

In other words: in most organisations the strategy exists, but it doesn't travel the way people think.

Why gaps become invisible

An organisation gets used to its own ways of working. Workarounds become habits, pain points become "normal", and weak signals get lost in day-to-day work. It isn't a lack of clarity: it is the natural consequence of being involved in the action every day.

Three mechanisms keep this blind spot in place:

• the position effect: leadership sees consolidated results, teams see concrete difficulties, and few people see both;
• the filter effect: information gets smoothed at every level as it travels up;
• the habit effect: what has been dysfunctional for a long time stops being seen as a problem.

The result: leadership sees the results, teams see the difficulties, but nobody sees the link between the two.

Where the most common gaps hide

A strategic audit examines several dimensions together, because it is often where they meet that performance is lost:

How a strategic audit works

At Vision Human Consulting, the audit follows the ODC method: Observe, Decode, Consolidate.

Observe

Interviews with leadership, middle management and frontline teams, observation of practices, analysis of existing documents and indicators. The aim is to see the situation as it is lived, not as it is described.

Choosing who to interview is essential. Sull and Homkes's work shows that understanding of priorities declines the further you get from leadership. Interviewing only the executive committee would mean seeing only the strategy as it is designed.

Decode

Findings are connected with one another. This is the key step: it separates causes from symptoms and identifies the truly critical gaps, those whose resolution will have the greatest effect.

A typical example: a drop in sales conversion may come from an outdated pitch, but also from slow handling of enquiries, a priority conflict between two departments, or a poorly framed target. Treating the wrong level produces no result.

Consolidate

The debrief presents a structured reading of the situation, prioritised issues and directly actionable recommendations, with tracking indicators. It is shared with leadership, and can be shared with the teams concerned.

What a good audit is not

An audit is not a thick report that ends up in a drawer. Nor is it a judgement on people. Its value comes down to one simple question: at the end, do we know what to act on first, and why?

A good audit doesn't list everything that's wrong. It says what matters most, and where to start.

When to consider an audit

• results fall short of objectives, with no obvious cause;
• leadership decisions don't show up in the field;
• you are preparing a reorganisation, a growth phase or a handover and want an outside view;
• internal or customer pain points are multiplying;
• teams describe the strategy in very different ways.

If any of these sound familiar, the Vision · Strategic audit offer is designed for exactly that.

Sources

• Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, Charles Sull, "Why Strategy Execution Unravels, and What to Do About It", Harvard Business Review, March 2015. Summarised by London Business School, "Two thirds of senior managers can't name their firm's top priorities", December 2015.
• Economist Intelligence Unit for the Project Management Institute, Why Good Strategies Fail: Lessons for the C-Suite, 2013.