By Marina Stasevich
Most strategies survive the boardroom. The real question is whether they can survive the operating system of the company.
Many leaders assume strategy fails because it is poorly communicated. More often, the problem is an organization that keeps rewarding business as usual. Drawing on her work with fast-growing tech companies, Marina Stasevich, Co-founder at SOTA, explains why strategy cannot live in static slide decks: it has to shape goals, incentives, decision rights, and cross-functional work, so daily decisions support the company’s direction instead of quietly pulling it apart.
Strategy doesn’t fail because people don’t understand it. More often, it fails because the organization is not set up to support execution. In her work with tech and fast-growing companies, Marina Stasevich, Co-founder at SOTA and executive coach, sees this pattern repeatedly.
C-level conversations tend to focus on what the company needs to achieve and, at best, where it wants to go — but almost never on how execution will actually happen. By the time that direction reaches the people who need to act on it, there is no clear bridge between strategic intent and day-to-day work. In many companies, strategy lives in slide decks, while local priorities and short-term pressures drive everyday decisions. When there is no clear link between strategy and everyday decisions, people naturally default to business as usual. That gap persists because the system around them pulls them in different directions.
Closing this gap isn’t about communicating strategy more often. It’s about embedding it into how decisions are made every day: what people need to do and, most importantly, what they need to say “No” to.
The Annual Plan Is Already Outdated
Annual planning is an important practice, but it creates the illusion of control, as in rapidly changing environments, things become outdated very quickly. If strategy is meant to guide real decisions, business plans and goals can’t be something people revisit only once a year. Strategy needs to live in an ongoing cycle.
Marina sees this regularly in her work. Last year, one company reached out asking us to facilitate a strategy session in just two weeks — they needed to align the co-founders and C-level team on a 1–3 year strategy before year-end. It’s a common situation, and it shows how easily strategy becomes a once-a-year emergency rather than an ongoing practice.
The companies that execute well typically operate with a simple, repeatable loop: make decisions, act on them, review what works, and adjust accordingly. Instead of aiming for a perfect long-term plan, they regularly reconnect strategy to decisions and actions through quarterly reviews of departmental and individual goals and simple weekly check-ins. That’s what keeps strategy up to date.
Strategy Breaks Down Between Teams, Not Within Them
OKRs are a useful and practical tool, but they don’t solve execution on their own. Most companies are good at setting goals within functions, but outcomes rarely sit neatly within a single function. And that disconnect is visible even in how strategy shows up in everyday work: research shows that around 63% of leaders say they refer to strategy weekly, while only 18% of team members do the same. That alone tells you where execution starts to break down.
For example, a sales team may hit all its activity targets – calls, meetings, demos – and still fail to deliver 20% growth. On paper, everything looks successful. In reality, the strategy is stuck.
The issue isn’t just goal-setting. It’s coordination and collaboration between teams. Strategy execution often breaks down at the points where teams need to align. This is why strategy needs more than departmental goals. Teams need to understand how the strategy depends on cross-functional execution.
Misalignment between teams most often blocks execution. For example, teams are asked to collaborate, but the success is measured against separate KPIs. Or leaders talk about long-term growth, while incentives reward short-term results. Decision-making authority is often unclear or fragmented.
When the strategy says one thing, but the day-to-day context tells people to do something else, it fails.
The Four Levers of Execution
To make a strategy executable, leaders need to align four things:
- Goals – what teams are measured on
- Incentives – what gets rewarded
- Decision rights – who decides what
- Ways of working – how teams collaborate
Without that alignment, even the best strategy will stall.
What is also important is that if you want different outcomes, you need to set the right examples and change the context in which people work, not just ask them to change.
Strategy Comes to Life in Everyday Decisions
You see it in how decisions are made. Managers start using a strategy to make choices and trade-offs. Teams coordinate earlier rather than escalating later. Priorities become clearer, and fewer things compete for attention. At that point, strategy is no longer something discussed occasionally; it becomes part of how the organization operates.
Also, for a strategy to work, it needs to be translated into clear responsibilities, impact, and accountability for each team member. At the same time, beyond clarity, people also need a sense of psychological safety and a connection to their own values to overcome resistance and get buy-in. Strategy is often created in boardrooms, but it comes to life in everyday decisions, and that happens only when people feel safe, aligned, and empowered.
SOTA’s client work offers a clear example of this: once the team was not just aligned, but had also worked through specific execution details, clarified roles, expectations, and timelines, and regularly reviewed and adjusted strategy and tactics, revenue grew by 16% year over year.
AI Accelerates Execution — If the System Is Ready
First, it’s important to remember that AI is a means, not the end. Recent MIT research suggests that up to 95% of organizations are not achieving meaningful ROI from their AI investments — and in many cases, the issue isn’t the technology itself, but the gap between strategy and execution. Too often, companies focus on implementing the AI itself, rather than the problems it’s supposed to solve. I advise leaders to treat AI adoption like an OKR and focus on business value: define the problem, set objectives, and measure outcomes. Check yourself with questions: What problem are we solving with AI? What outcome do we want to achieve? How will we know it’s working? Ultimately, the goal is to deliver something customers truly value.
Only when AI is tied to real business impact does it stop being a shiny tool and start driving meaningful results.
Beyond that, leaders need to align people, processes, and incentives, redesign workflows around AI insights, and create a rhythm of continuous learning. AI accelerates execution, but only if the system is ready to act differently.
Your strategy isn’t failing because it’s wrong. It’s failing because the system around it — goals, incentives, decision-making, and ways of working — wasn’t designed to support it.
Fix the system, and the strategy has a chance. Leave it unchanged, and even the best plan will quietly disappear into a slide deck.
Marina Stasevich
