73–77% of senior leaders said they were positively influencing project cost, planning and schedule performance. Only 13% of frontline workers said leadership decisions consistently shaped their daily work.
Those numbers came from a recent Accenture study of 1,050 capital-project leaders and frontline workers.
--That gap caught my attention.--
Because I think we often describe the strategy-execution gap as a one-way problem:
- Can leadership translate strategy into clear priorities?
- Do teams understand what matters?
- Are resources and work aligned to the strategy?
All important questions.
But strategy execution has another direction that gets much less attention.
Can execution reality travel back up to leadership fast enough to change a decision?
Think about the flow:
Strategy → priorities → execution
That's only half the system.
The other half is:
Execution evidence → business consequence → leadership decision
When that return path breaks, leaders can have a clear strategy and still operate with an outdated understanding of reality.
- A dependency changes.
- A milestone slips.
- Adoption weakens.
- Capacity disappears.
A risk starts affecting the value the initiative was supposed to create.
The information may exist somewhere in the organization. But if it arrives late, gets filtered into a status color, or loses its connection to the business outcome, leadership sees the project without fully seeing the consequence.
This is why I believe execution visibility and Execution Intelligence are different things.
- Visibility tells leadership what is happening.
- Execution Intelligence helps leadership understand what changing execution means for strategy and enterprise performance while there is still time to act.
Strategy has to survive the journey into execution. But execution truth also has to survive the journey back to strategy.
In your organization, where do you see more information getting lost: strategy moving down into execution, or execution reality moving back up to leadership?
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