1. When Vision, Direction, and the “Why” Fail to Create a Shared Foundation – The Quiet Beginning of Strategic Failure
In my work with leadership teams, I often come across strategies that are sophisticated, well-structured, and impressive when presented on slides. Yet when I ask a simple question - "What problem is this strategy actually trying to solve? What future, direction, or vision is it intended to support?" - the room often falls silent.
Or I get five different answers from ten people. Why?
Because there is no clear, shared, and collectively understood direction. There is no common foundation on which strategy development and execution can be built.
Research suggests that in many organizations only 5–20% of employees truly understand the company's strategic priorities. This is one of the most common reasons why strategy execution fails.
Before leaders decide how to move forward, people across the organization need to understand what future they are trying to create and why.
Without a shared understanding at this level, how can meaningful conversations take place about the what and how of strategy?
What will the future look like when we get there? What will we see when we look around?
Who are our customers, and what defines them?
What are we known for?
What do customers experience when they interact with us?
How do we operate?
Which values and principles guide our work?
What do we do differently from today?
What do our employees and partners experience?
What impact do we want to have?
This is what a shared vision is: a collective picture of the future that people not only understand but also feel connected to because it describes what success will actually look like.
A shared vision becomes the foundation for strategic decisions and coordinated action across the organization. A clear direction emerges through dialogue, shared interpretation, and agreement.
This is what scholars refer to as sensemaking: the process through which leaders and organizational members create shared meaning from uncertain, ambiguous, or rapidly changing information and then use that shared understanding to make decisions and shape strategy.
When the direction and the underlying "why" are unclear from the outset, this chain almost inevitably breaks down later.
That is why the future should not be described through abstract statements and corporate buzzwords.
It needs to be expressed through clear and concrete descriptions of behaviors, actions, experiences, and situations that people can actually imagine and recognize.
For many leadership teams, this is not an easy process. It requires moving beyond familiar strategic language and corporate clichés toward tangible descriptions of what success would look like in practice.
Organizations need to create a prototype of their future together: a concrete picture of how the organization will look, feel, and operate when the vision becomes reality.
Only then can a shared understanding emerge around strategic direction and priorities.
It is not enough to say:
"We will become a market-leading, customer-centric organization."
People need something more concrete, describing the future via behaviours, acts, experiences:
"Customers can manage most of their interactions through a single digital platform, accessing services in just a few clicks while still receiving personal support whenever they need it."
"Online and phone inquiries receive fast and predictable responses. Customers know when and how they will receive an answer and do not need to explain the same problem multiple times."
Descriptions like these transform the future from an abstract aspiration into something visible and imaginable. People begin to see how the organization will operate. The future becomes easier to understand, believe in, and move toward.
The leadership team - and often a broader group across the organization - needs to participate in shaping that future together. Shared sensemaking is essential.
What Happens When Leadership Does Not Participate in the Process?
I once worked with an organization where the leadership team received the vision fully developed and ready-made.
The CEO had outsourced the work to a marketing and communications agency. The new vision and mission were handed to the leadership team during a management meeting, printed on small cards, with a simple instruction:
"Here is the vision. Now build your functional strategies around it."
The shared sensemaking process never happened.
There was no discussion about what the vision meant in practice. No alignment around priorities, operating implications, resources, or capabilities.
Everyone left the room and interpreted it in their own way.
When leaders, or even the wider organization, do not go through the process of jointly interpreting and shaping the future, they often do not fully understand, and sometimes do not even agree on:
why the organization is moving in a particular direction,
what future it is actually trying to create,
what that future means in practical terms.
When execution begins, each function starts following its own script.
Different interpretations spread throughout the organization. Different priorities emerge. Leaders communicate different messages, teams focus on different goals. Initiatives develop independently because people are working from different assumptions about the vision and strategic direction and in the end, the organization is no longer executing one strategy.
When strategies are created in silos and without sufficient organizational dialogue, teams inevitably interpret the same direction differently and begin operating according to different versions of reality.
Global Strategy, Local Execution, and the Absence of a Shared Local Vision
In many global organizations, local leaders do not define the strategy themselves. The direction comes from headquarters.
In these situations, leadership teams often see themselves primarily as executors. They recognize tensions and challenges but feel they have limited influence over them.
Yet even within those constraints, leaders can still:
build shared understanding,
create local meaning around the purpose,
develop a concrete picture of what success looks like in their own context.
Leaders can create a local prototype of the future.The strategy may be global, but it only becomes operational when local leaders interpret and translate it into their own environment.
The real question is not whether constraints exist. The question is whether leaders recognize the room they have to act and make conscious use of it.
What About Decentralized Organizations?
Organizational models built around autonomy and self-management, including agile organizations, self-organizing teams, holacracy, and other decentralized structures, bring decision-making closer to customers and teams.
The greater the autonomy, the greater the need for a clear and shared purpose.
When vision and purpose are vague, autonomy does not accelerate the organization, it slows it down.
That is why these models emphasize a simple principle: clear purpose and decentralized decision-making.
A Simple Leadership Team Exercise
If you want to test how clear your shared direction really is, try this exercise with your leadership team.
Ask everyone to answer the following question individually:
❓ If you had already achieved the future you are working toward, what would you see around you?
If the answers differ significantly or fail to connect into a coherent picture, you may have just discovered where the real strategic work begins.