The work between deciding and done
Most strategies don't fail at the decision. They fail in the gap that comes after it.
Boards are good at deciding. The room agrees, the deck is approved, the announcement goes out. And then, six months on, the thing that was decided has quietly not happened — not because anyone refused, but because no one held the gap between the decision and the doing.
That gap is where I work.
The decision is the easy part
A merger is approved in an afternoon. The integration takes eighteen months and breaks in places no slide predicted. A new operating model is signed off by the executive; whether it survives contact with the organisation depends on a hundred conversations no one scheduled.
The decision is a moment. The landing is a campaign. Most organisations resource the first and improvise the second.
What actually happens in the gap
People wait to see if leadership means it. Middle managers translate the decision into their own dialect — sometimes faithfully, often not. The quiet sceptics calibrate their effort to how much follow-through they expect. None of this shows up in a status report until it's already cost you a quarter.
The work in the gap is unglamorous and specific:
- Turning a decision into the three behaviours that actually signal it's real.
- Finding the people whose buy-in is load-bearing, and the ones whose resistance is information.
- Holding the line on the hard parts when the organisation's instinct is to soften them back to comfortable.
Why an outsider holds it better
Not because an outsider is smarter. Because an outsider has no internal coalition to protect, no history to defend, and no reason to let the decision drift back toward the status quo. I can say the sentence in the room that everyone is thinking and no one whose career lives there can afford to say.
If you've decided something important and you can feel it not landing — that's the brief.