Where Execution Breaks

An initiative stalls. The launch slips, the new sales motion doesn’t stick, the cross-functional project that looked clean on the org chart quietly dies. The reflex in most companies is the same: call an all-hands, restate the why, rebuild belief. Get everyone bought in again.

Sometimes that is the right move. Often, it is a quarter spent fixing a problem the company does not have.

When execution falters, it feels like a faith problem. If people truly understood the strategy and wanted it, the logic goes, they would carry it out; a breakdown must mean the message never landed. Generations of management thinking treat execution as alignment: link strategy to action up and down the hierarchy, tie incentives to goals, and results follow. It is a coherent theory, and it is partly true.

It is also, as a diagnosis, usually wrong. A multi-year study of more than 250 companies, led by Donald Sull, found that the alignment story does not hold up. Fully 84 percent of managers said they could rely on their boss and their direct reports all or most of the time. Vertical alignment, the thing companies obsess over, is largely a solved problem. The number that mattered was different: only 9 percent of managers said they could rely on colleagues in other functions all the time. Execution was breaking sideways, across the handoffs, under the pressure of competing priorities and a hard clock, not up and down the chain of command.

We find it useful to separate two very different failures that look identical from a distance. The first is a drop between knowing and committing.

People understand the plan but have not genuinely signed up for it, so what looks like compliance is really shrugging. That is a buy-in problem, and the buy-in fixes work on it: ownership, motivation, and a clearer why. The second is a drop between committing and doing. People understand the plan, they mean it, and the behavior still collapses when the week gets hard. That is an execution-under-pressure problem, and buy-in won’t fix it. We score those two breaks at different points on a simple grid, and the diagnosis almost always surprises our clients because they had assumed every execution failure was the first kind, when most are the second.

The two need opposite fixes, and applying the wrong one is expensive. Throw more motivation at a commit-to-do gap, and you get a more inspired team that still misses, because the problem was never conviction. Throw protocol and process at a know-to-commit gap, and you get resentful compliance, because the problem was never the mechanics. Most teams cannot tell the two apart, so they reach for whichever fix is culturally familiar, usually another round of buy-in, and the real break goes untouched.

Why does committed behavior fall apart under pressure at all? The reason is physical. Under acute stress, the prefrontal cortex, the brain region we rely on for deliberate, goal-directed action, measurably degrades. The thinking brain that nodded along in the calm planning room is partly offline on the day a major account threatens to walk. This is why pressure deserves its own place in any honest diagnosis. A behavior that holds in the conference room and a behavior that holds when the prefrontal cortex is flooded are not the same behavior, and only one of them counts.

I learned this version of it before I ever saw it in a company. In the infantry, every patrol got briefed, and everyone in the room agreed with the plan. The agreement was free. What decided the outcome was what the body did in the first three seconds of contact, when there was no time to reason, and you fell to whatever you had drilled. Units did not rise to the plan. They fell to their level of training. The same is true of a leadership team on its worst Tuesday.

So the fix for a commit-to-do gap is mechanical, not motivational. You engineer a behavior that survives the moment the thinking brain checks out, and you build it through enough repetition that it runs without deliberation. You are not motivating yourself through pressure. You are rehearsing a response so it is there when motivation is gone.

That points to a different Monday morning than the all-hands. Name the one behavior that actually decides whether this strategy lives, specific enough that you could watch someone do it. Then ask the honest diagnostic question: when it failed last time, was it because people did not believe in it, or because they believed in it and still did not do it when it counted? If the answer is the first, do the buy-in work. If it is the second, stop talking about belief and build the protocol. Write the cue and the response in “when this, then that” form. Drill it until it is boring. And measure the behavior itself under real conditions, not satisfaction on a survey, because the survey measures the calm room and the work happens in the loud one.

It is structured judgment, anchored to evidence and to what people actually do when pressure hits. But the discipline of asking where the break really is, before reaching for a fix, is most of the battle. The plan was the easy part. Knowing which gap you are standing in front of, and refusing to treat a doing problem as a believing problem, is the work that separates the teams that execute from the ones that keep planning.

This document cites sources from Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, and Charles Sull (Harvard Business Review); and Amy Arnsten (Nature Reviews Neuroscience). Contact us for a complete list of works cited.