Strategy Dies in Translation
Strategy doesn’t fail in the boardroom. It dies in transmission, one well-meaning layer at a time. The fix is a communication discipline almost nobody teaches.
You set a strategy. It was clear when it left your hands. Coherent, prioritized, the product of real thought about what the organization should do and, just as important, what it should not.
Six months later you watch the front line execute, and what they’re doing only distantly resembles the thing you set. Not the opposite of it. Just a blurred, drifted, locally-mutated version, with the sharp edges rounded off and half the priorities quietly inverted. Nobody disobeyed. Everybody executed. The thing that arrived at the bottom simply wasn’t the thing that left the top.
This is one of the most common and least-discussed failures in executive life, and it’s worth being precise about, because the usual explanations are wrong. It isn’t that the strategy was bad. It isn’t that people didn’t care or didn’t try. It’s that strategy has to travel, and every layer it crosses translates it, and every translation loses something.
Every layer is a translation step
Think about what actually happens to a strategy as it moves down an organization.
You set it at the top in the language of intent and direction. Your reports take that and translate it into priorities for their functions. Their managers take those priorities and translate them into objectives for their teams. The team leads translate the objectives into tasks. The front line translates the tasks into what they actually do on a Tuesday. Each arrow is not a transmission. It’s a translation, performed by a person re-expressing what they received in the language of their own context and their own pressures.
