The Translation Problem: Why Good Strategy Dies Between the Boardroom and the Frontline

The question nobody’s asking

A major Australian bank had 43 initiatives labelled “strategic.” When we mapped them against their stated strategic bets, only 26 were connected to outcomes the organisation said mattered. The remaining 17, consuming $47 million annually, had no connection to any strategic goal.

These weren’t bad initiatives. They had business cases, executive sponsors, project teams, status reports. By every internal metric, they were succeeding. But they were succeeding at things that didn’t matter to the strategy the board had approved.

When we presented this finding, the CEO’s response was immediate: “How did no one see this?”

It’s the right question. And the answer isn’t that people were incompetent or negligent. Every one of those 17 initiative owners was doing good work. The problem was structural: everyone was looking at their piece. The initiatives were visible. The strategy was visible. But the connection between them (or its absence) was not.

This is not a failure of execution discipline or strategic clarity. It’s a failure of visibility. The organisation cannot see the space between strategy and execution, where the patterns that determine success or failure actually form.

What we measured

We traced every initiative to the strategic bet it claimed to serve, then assessed three dimensions: whether the bet itself was clearly articulated as a testable hypothesis, whether the initiative had a demonstrable causal link to the bet’s thesis, and whether evidence was accumulating that the bet was paying off.

The results were stark. Of the 43 initiatives:

• 26 had a traceable connection to a strategic bet
• 17 were orphaned, with no measurable strategic connection
• $47M in annual spend was allocated to orphaned work
• 73% of signal fidelity was lost across three organisational layers

Where intent gets lost

Between the information that shapes strategy and the machinery that executes it, there is a translation layer. Strategy gets interpreted, filtered, prioritised, distorted, negotiated, and attenuated as it passes through the organisation. This happens at every boundary: between leadership layers, between business units, between planning horizons, between stated values and actual incentives.

The pattern is consistent. A board approves a strategic shift. The CEO communicates it. Executives interpret it through their divisional lens. Middle management translates it into objectives their teams can act on. Frontline teams execute against those objectives. At every step, something is lost. Specificity becomes ambiguity. Urgency becomes routine. Testable hypotheses become vague aspirations.

The compounding effect

Signal loss compounds. If 15% of fidelity is lost at each boundary crossing, and strategic intent must cross four boundaries to reach execution, the frontline is operating on roughly half the original signal. That’s not a communication problem. That’s a structural inevitability of how organisations are built, and it explains why well-resourced, well-intentioned organisations consistently fail to execute strategies that seemed perfectly clear at the top.

Nobody wakes up in the morning planning to disconnect from strategy. The disconnection is emergent, a natural consequence of organisational structure that nobody is measuring because it falls between everyone’s accountability.

The five boundaries where strategy dies

Through our analysis, we identified five recurring boundary types where strategic intent is most commonly lost:

Vertical boundaries: between leadership layers. Intent attenuates as it moves down. Context gets stripped. A nuanced strategic bet becomes a simplified directive becomes a task on a Jira board. By the time it reaches the people doing the work, the “why” has evaporated.

Horizontal boundaries: between functions and teams. Sales and Marketing both executing well against their own targets, but optimising against each other. Product and Engineering aligned on what to build, but not on when or why. The collision happens in the space between them, a space nobody owns.

Temporal boundaries: between time horizons. A three-year investment thesis measured by quarterly OKRs. Long-horizon decisions deferred because the short-horizon measurement system can’t see them. The feedback loop between investment logic and execution cadence was never built.

External boundaries: between the organisation and its market. Customer signals that don’t penetrate. Market shifts that aren’t seen until they’re crises. Messaging that contradicts internal reality.

Cultural boundaries: between stated and actual values. The organisation declares itself “customer-first” while its promotion criteria reward internal political skill. The gap between what’s said and what’s rewarded creates invisible friction at every level.

Implications

The conventional diagnosis for strategic failure is some combination of “poor execution,” “cultural resistance,” or “insufficient buy-in.” These are symptoms, not causes. They describe the visible effects of an invisible structural problem: the absence of any mechanism to monitor what happens to strategic intent as it passes through the organisation.

The organisations we examined had sophisticated systems for tracking initiatives and articulating strategy. What they universally lacked was the ability to see whether one actually connected to the other, and what broke that connection when it didn’t.

That visibility gap is where we believe the next generation of strategic capability will be built. Not better strategy. Not better execution. Better sight.