I think this distinction often stems from the gap between strategy design - carried out by 'thinkers' - and its delivery or materialization (a term I've used in previous comments here) — carried out by 'doers'. I won't claim this is universal, but it's something I've witnessed frequently.
The problem arises when 'thinkers' design strategy without accounting for the realities of its delivery. All the challenges that emerge along the way - the traps, the friction, the unexpected obstacles - tend to be invisible inside the 'strategy room'. When they're ignored at the design stage, they don't disappear; they simply wait to activate and derail the desired outcome. In short, strategic choices are often made without accounting for the practical traps that exist outside that room.
I've written an article on eight competencies of a strategy execution engine — which I could equally describe as the eight must-have capabilities and management systems any organization needs. In my view, these two steps of your Strategy Choice Cascade do a great deal to bridge exactly that gap between strategy design and delivery.
I feel like Roger's point is more like the difference between "thinkers" and "doers" is of level, degree and leverage rather than actually "thinking" (or "designing") and "doing".
In the knowledge economy what do "doers" actually do? Slides? E-mails? But that's also clearly connected with thinking
And "thinkers", they tell "doers" on a higher level directions that they then follow to craft the slides and e-mails? Very similar activity, just on a higher level of supervision, and with leverage
So everyone does the same nature of things - doing, execution, thinking, strategizing - only with more and more granularity, with tighter and tighter constraints. That's decision chartering!
Which makes your point about not listening the downstream people extremely relevant - that's the breakdown that produces kill zones...
Ahh Roger, so again you face your old arch-enemy, execution! 😅
Yeah, your more typical battle for a genuine understanding of strategy as integrated choices that compel customer choice, something separate from planning, is already tough enough in the face of market status quo. This one, against the separation between strategy and execution, the odds seem insurmountable.
But, if we are to be defined by our enemies, what an incredible one this one is!
Myself, you have provoked me to reflect a lot about this over the years. I fully agree that concepts need to be well-defined and separate from each other, otherwise discussions become silly circular circuses. And yet execution is so commonly seen as something whose meaning aggregates elsewhere-but-not-entirely-separate from strategy… It feels like a business shorthand for something that’s *not* pure strategy.
So here’s my personal take. Execution is this ill-defined umbrella that, in common parlance, does include parts of strategy, of planning, and other things. It’s this weird foggy Venn diagram of management. The challenge, perhaps, is to take better-defined meanings out of it, and see what remains.
When I did the exercise, I ended up clearing five distinct concepts out of it, until nothing of “execution” remained:
1. Strategy - real choices and derived actions, no need to insist on this part of your argument;
2. Planning - commitments taken, ideally following strategy and operating imperatives (unfortunately not always);
3. Alignment - this is where something different begins! Take out too the definition of KPIs, OKRs, BSCs, incentives and such that’s supposed to bind people’s interests together;
4. Enactment - which is basically Pfeffer & Sutton’s “Knowing-Doing” element ie you DO exactly that which you KNOW you have to do;
5. Operational Regime - all that remains of the “execution” after the four above are taken out, essentially the component of building and managing non-strategic / non-enabling systems (Hrebeniak and Vicente Falconi focus a lot of this)
Seeing through this lens and discussing with people, the interesting thing is that many seem to defend that:
- execution and strategy ARE actually different things;
- they have no problem taking #1 and #2 out of execution;
- at #3 they become uncomfortable, feeling like that’s a salient but inseparable part of execution;
- #5 is the closest “actual meaning” of execution;
- but when leaders say they have an “execution problem” the majority of times they intend to mean a problem with #4, a “knowing-doing gap”!
So yeah, silly and amorphous and confusing word with lots of built-in ambiguity.
Which may be exactly why “Execution” survives and thrives in most orgs. Conceptual clarity is a requirement of strategy and good choices, but ambiguity seems to be the default coordination attractor in management. It demands much less intellectual exposure from managers, and tilts rewards to political relationships.
Reflecting a bit more about this, it's interesting to try to see this through your brain-arm analogy:
> All the people who have every told me that ‘a mediocre strategy well executed always beats a great strategy poorly executed’ cannot explain to me how they know a strategy is ‘great’ if it has failed
It's like saying "if you're trying to drink coffee, a brain that tells the arm to drop the coffee on your lap but then the arm disobeys and brings the coffee smoothly to your mouth, beats a brain that is perfect at sending neuronal signals to a defective arm that drops the coffee anyway." Which is a very weird analogy, for sure! "An arm that revolts against a defective brain" basically admits that the arm has a brain of its own!
Less metaphorically: "great execution" seems to always require "great strategy". If the top management provides mediocre strategy and the frontline basically *disobeys them* and perform a good job, that's good strategy too! Even if it's "bottom-up" or "emergent" or "learning"
Thanks for pushing this one back to the top of my mind Roger - what's you're describing, in my opinion, is the concept of catchball from hoshin kanri, in its fullest form. To expect that subordinates will just take the strategy and execute basically shuts them out the strategizing and planning part of the business, and shuts leaders out of the refinement needed for continuous improvement and improving the strategy. A better recipe for fingerpointing I cannot imagine.
Instead, asking subordinates to reviewing the choices and trade-offs suggested so far, and to present their own choices and trade-offs as they cascade down the strategy, puts the soul back into catchball - and helps everyone not only bring their hands but also their heart and minds to the plan. Now the organization has a real running start to alignment, changing capabilities and creating value.
Martin wins the logical argument. The strategy/execution distinction was always a mechanism for those who formulated the strategy to avoid accountability for where it ended up. The reframe is overdue.
But accepting it opens a harder problem. Strategic choices passed downward through an organisation don't arrive intact. They pass through layers of interpretation. Each layer translates what it received before passing it on. The intent at the top and the understanding at the bottom are not the same thing, not because people lack capability, but because meaning drifts in transit.
Strategic Choice Chartering solves the job design problem. It tells everyone they are making strategy choices, which is correct. It does not solve what happens to those choices as they travel. A leader who charters strategic choices downward still has to manage interpretation. Meaning does not move through an organisation the way a document does.
Martin's reframe raises a question it doesn't answer: who is responsible for closing the gap between what was chartered and what was understood?
I would offer 3 reasons why your point of view is still largely rejected, acknowledging there may have others:
1/ execution is a very convenient concept. It enables CEOs to blame poor results on the rank & file as you've explained. It also enables other CEOs to ignore strategy (only execution matters!!!) as you've described in other articles
2/ the idea that strategy is thinking and execution is doing is so engrained that any attempt to say strategy and execution are the same thing only results in brains to freeze. People reject the idea out of hand and don't really listen to your argument. That's why I say to clients that to "properly execute" their strategies they need to follow the same process than for the formulation, i.e. make WTP/HTW choices at each level and aligned with one another. There usually is a light bulb moment, when they don't say "of course"" as if they had done this all the time (!!!). But I avoid saying strategy = execution because I know they'd fiercely resist the very idea. Sigh
3/ last but not least: it’s hard to explain to your subordinates what are your strategy choices when your strategy is a plan, i.e. an ambitious financial goal and a list of initiatives. You can cascade initiatives (e.g. cost cutting) but that’s not the same
I think this distinction often stems from the gap between strategy design - carried out by 'thinkers' - and its delivery or materialization (a term I've used in previous comments here) — carried out by 'doers'. I won't claim this is universal, but it's something I've witnessed frequently.
The problem arises when 'thinkers' design strategy without accounting for the realities of its delivery. All the challenges that emerge along the way - the traps, the friction, the unexpected obstacles - tend to be invisible inside the 'strategy room'. When they're ignored at the design stage, they don't disappear; they simply wait to activate and derail the desired outcome. In short, strategic choices are often made without accounting for the practical traps that exist outside that room.
I've written an article on eight competencies of a strategy execution engine — which I could equally describe as the eight must-have capabilities and management systems any organization needs. In my view, these two steps of your Strategy Choice Cascade do a great deal to bridge exactly that gap between strategy design and delivery.
I feel like Roger's point is more like the difference between "thinkers" and "doers" is of level, degree and leverage rather than actually "thinking" (or "designing") and "doing".
In the knowledge economy what do "doers" actually do? Slides? E-mails? But that's also clearly connected with thinking
And "thinkers", they tell "doers" on a higher level directions that they then follow to craft the slides and e-mails? Very similar activity, just on a higher level of supervision, and with leverage
So everyone does the same nature of things - doing, execution, thinking, strategizing - only with more and more granularity, with tighter and tighter constraints. That's decision chartering!
Which makes your point about not listening the downstream people extremely relevant - that's the breakdown that produces kill zones...
In all my strategy frameworks, the "execution' step is actually always part of strategy itself.
That's the move!
Which also explains why Bossidy & Charan attempted a reverse heist, smuggling "strategy" inside their definition of "execution" 😅
Ahh Roger, so again you face your old arch-enemy, execution! 😅
Yeah, your more typical battle for a genuine understanding of strategy as integrated choices that compel customer choice, something separate from planning, is already tough enough in the face of market status quo. This one, against the separation between strategy and execution, the odds seem insurmountable.
But, if we are to be defined by our enemies, what an incredible one this one is!
Myself, you have provoked me to reflect a lot about this over the years. I fully agree that concepts need to be well-defined and separate from each other, otherwise discussions become silly circular circuses. And yet execution is so commonly seen as something whose meaning aggregates elsewhere-but-not-entirely-separate from strategy… It feels like a business shorthand for something that’s *not* pure strategy.
So here’s my personal take. Execution is this ill-defined umbrella that, in common parlance, does include parts of strategy, of planning, and other things. It’s this weird foggy Venn diagram of management. The challenge, perhaps, is to take better-defined meanings out of it, and see what remains.
When I did the exercise, I ended up clearing five distinct concepts out of it, until nothing of “execution” remained:
1. Strategy - real choices and derived actions, no need to insist on this part of your argument;
2. Planning - commitments taken, ideally following strategy and operating imperatives (unfortunately not always);
3. Alignment - this is where something different begins! Take out too the definition of KPIs, OKRs, BSCs, incentives and such that’s supposed to bind people’s interests together;
4. Enactment - which is basically Pfeffer & Sutton’s “Knowing-Doing” element ie you DO exactly that which you KNOW you have to do;
5. Operational Regime - all that remains of the “execution” after the four above are taken out, essentially the component of building and managing non-strategic / non-enabling systems (Hrebeniak and Vicente Falconi focus a lot of this)
Seeing through this lens and discussing with people, the interesting thing is that many seem to defend that:
- execution and strategy ARE actually different things;
- they have no problem taking #1 and #2 out of execution;
- at #3 they become uncomfortable, feeling like that’s a salient but inseparable part of execution;
- #5 is the closest “actual meaning” of execution;
- but when leaders say they have an “execution problem” the majority of times they intend to mean a problem with #4, a “knowing-doing gap”!
So yeah, silly and amorphous and confusing word with lots of built-in ambiguity.
Which may be exactly why “Execution” survives and thrives in most orgs. Conceptual clarity is a requirement of strategy and good choices, but ambiguity seems to be the default coordination attractor in management. It demands much less intellectual exposure from managers, and tilts rewards to political relationships.
The toughest enemy, indeed…
Reflecting a bit more about this, it's interesting to try to see this through your brain-arm analogy:
> All the people who have every told me that ‘a mediocre strategy well executed always beats a great strategy poorly executed’ cannot explain to me how they know a strategy is ‘great’ if it has failed
It's like saying "if you're trying to drink coffee, a brain that tells the arm to drop the coffee on your lap but then the arm disobeys and brings the coffee smoothly to your mouth, beats a brain that is perfect at sending neuronal signals to a defective arm that drops the coffee anyway." Which is a very weird analogy, for sure! "An arm that revolts against a defective brain" basically admits that the arm has a brain of its own!
Less metaphorically: "great execution" seems to always require "great strategy". If the top management provides mediocre strategy and the frontline basically *disobeys them* and perform a good job, that's good strategy too! Even if it's "bottom-up" or "emergent" or "learning"
Thanks for pushing this one back to the top of my mind Roger - what's you're describing, in my opinion, is the concept of catchball from hoshin kanri, in its fullest form. To expect that subordinates will just take the strategy and execute basically shuts them out the strategizing and planning part of the business, and shuts leaders out of the refinement needed for continuous improvement and improving the strategy. A better recipe for fingerpointing I cannot imagine.
Instead, asking subordinates to reviewing the choices and trade-offs suggested so far, and to present their own choices and trade-offs as they cascade down the strategy, puts the soul back into catchball - and helps everyone not only bring their hands but also their heart and minds to the plan. Now the organization has a real running start to alignment, changing capabilities and creating value.
Martin wins the logical argument. The strategy/execution distinction was always a mechanism for those who formulated the strategy to avoid accountability for where it ended up. The reframe is overdue.
But accepting it opens a harder problem. Strategic choices passed downward through an organisation don't arrive intact. They pass through layers of interpretation. Each layer translates what it received before passing it on. The intent at the top and the understanding at the bottom are not the same thing, not because people lack capability, but because meaning drifts in transit.
Strategic Choice Chartering solves the job design problem. It tells everyone they are making strategy choices, which is correct. It does not solve what happens to those choices as they travel. A leader who charters strategic choices downward still has to manage interpretation. Meaning does not move through an organisation the way a document does.
Martin's reframe raises a question it doesn't answer: who is responsible for closing the gap between what was chartered and what was understood?
I would offer 3 reasons why your point of view is still largely rejected, acknowledging there may have others:
1/ execution is a very convenient concept. It enables CEOs to blame poor results on the rank & file as you've explained. It also enables other CEOs to ignore strategy (only execution matters!!!) as you've described in other articles
2/ the idea that strategy is thinking and execution is doing is so engrained that any attempt to say strategy and execution are the same thing only results in brains to freeze. People reject the idea out of hand and don't really listen to your argument. That's why I say to clients that to "properly execute" their strategies they need to follow the same process than for the formulation, i.e. make WTP/HTW choices at each level and aligned with one another. There usually is a light bulb moment, when they don't say "of course"" as if they had done this all the time (!!!). But I avoid saying strategy = execution because I know they'd fiercely resist the very idea. Sigh
3/ last but not least: it’s hard to explain to your subordinates what are your strategy choices when your strategy is a plan, i.e. an ambitious financial goal and a list of initiatives. You can cascade initiatives (e.g. cost cutting) but that’s not the same