Most strategy work fails at the beginning, not the end. The offsite goes well. The plan is sound. Three months later almost nothing has changed, and everyone blames execution. They are looking in the wrong place.

The situation

A services firm, about ฿90M, ran a clean strategy offsite. The leadership team agreed to move upmarket: fewer, larger clients, higher fees, deeper work. Everyone left aligned. A quarter later the firm was still taking the same small accounts it had decided to stop taking.

The owner wanted to talk about accountability and follow-through. I asked to see how the sales team got paid.

How I read it

When a strategy stalls, the cause usually sits upstream of execution. Two structures defeat more plans than any lack of effort, and both are invisible until you look for them.

1
The incentive structureIf people are still rewarded for the old behaviour, the new strategy loses every time. Not because they disagree with it, but because the system makes the old move the sensible one.
2
The decision structureA strategy that needs fast, decentralised decisions runs aground in a business where every real call must reach the top. The structure obstructs the plan, and no one is to blame.
The two upstream structures that quietly defeat a sound strategy.

The working

The firm paid its salespeople on volume of accounts closed. The new strategy asked them to close fewer, larger, slower deals. The math told them to ignore the strategy, so they did, rationally.

What strategy askedWhat pay rewarded
Deal sizeLargerAny size
Deal countFewerMore
Sales cycleLonger, deeperFast close
Rational choiceMove upmarketKeep churning small deals
Why the team kept doing the old thing. The incentive pointed the other way.

No one was obstructing the plan. The plan was simply more expensive to follow than to ignore, given how the business was built. That is what a real diagnosis looks for: not whether the strategy is good, but whether the business is structured to support it.

The move

Before starting any strategy work, I ask one question: what would have to be true about this business for the strategy to actually run? The answer usually names the real problem, and it is rarely the strategy itself.

The answer is not to explain the strategy more clearly. The strategy is clear enough. What is unclear is why the business is built to make it expensive.

Most businesses are not structured for their own strategy, not because of bad leadership, but because structure changes slowly and strategy moves fast. Fix the incentive and the decision path first. Then the plan runs on its own.