The execution compass: why your strategy fails between the boardroom and the backlog

A leadership team gathers for a quarterly review. On the screen is a dashboard, glowing red. The flagship initiative, meant to digitise customer interactions, is on time and on budget. Yet, customer acquisition metrics are down, and retention is flat. The team completed the tasks they set out to do, but the value never materialised. They followed the map perfectly, but it led them off a cliff.

This scenario is the quiet failure haunting most organisations. There isn’t a gap between strategy and execution; there’s a broken link. We create strategies as static maps, which are beautifully drawn documents filled with assumptions about the terrain ahead. But the market is not a fixed landscape; it’s a volatile ocean. What leaders need isn’t a better map, but a dynamic compass: a live, data driven system that connects high level intent to ground level action, allowing teams to navigate, learn, and adjust in real time.

Building this “Execution Compass” isn’t about more meetings or bureaucracy. It’s about creating clarity and discipline through three deliberate shifts in how you operate.

Define Your True North: From Initiatives to Vital Signs

Most strategies are lists of things to do: initiatives, projects, transformations. This is a critical error. It encourages teams to measure progress by task completion, not value creation. A strategy focused on “what we will do” is brittle. A strategy focused on “what success will look like” is resilient.

The first step is to form a vision or mission statement. This is the single statement that aligns all teams and individuals to a common high level outcome. From here, do the same for each relevant domain to your business; Customer, Product, Finance etc. These are your strategic goals. Then, translate these goals into “Metrics That Matter” (MTMs). These are not day to day KPIs; they are the high level, lagging indicators that prove the business is healthy and the strategy is working over the entire period of the strategy. For a SaaS company, this might be Net Revenue Retention in the Finance domain. For a logistics firm, it could be Cost Per Delivery in the Operations domain.

These MTMs, co-created and agreed upon by the leadership team, become the organisation’s True North. They replace opinion based debates about progress with evidence based conversations about performance.

Set Your Quarterly Bearing: From Annual Plans to Focused Objectives

With your True North defined, you can now set a clear, short term direction. This is the role of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). While your MTMs are stable, your OKRs are dynamic. Each quarter, the leadership team reviews the MTMs and asks: “Where is our single biggest drag or opportunity?”

If an MTM shows customer churn is rising, the quarter’s objective isn’t a vague goal like “improve customer service.” It’s a specific, focused mission: “Objective: Reverse churn in our enterprise segment. Key Result: Reduce enterprise logo churn from 4% to 2% by the end of Q3.”

This process transforms the MTMs from a passive dashboard into a trigger for focused action. It directs the entire organisation’s energy towards the one or two things that will make the most difference, right now.

A common objection to a quarterly cadence is some priorities take longer than a quarter. Just because they are reviewed every quarter doesn't mean they need to change. But it's an intentional review every quarter to make sure it's still a valid priority.

Navigate the Terrain: From Big Projects to Actions and Bets

Once an OKR is set, it cascades into the work itself. But not all work is created equal. The Execution Compass requires distinguishing between two types of activity: Actions and Bets.

• Actions are initiatives where the path is known and the outcome is predictable. If you have clear evidence that running a certain marketing campaign yields a specific return, you take action. You invest, scale, and execute with confidence.

• Bets are experiments designed for learning. When you’re facing uncertainty with a new market, an unproven technology, or a novel customer problem, you place a bet. You invest a small amount of time and resources to test a hypothesis and generate the data you currently lack.

This distinction is crucial. It stops teams from launching massive, high risk projects based on unproven assumptions. Instead, you systematically de-risk your strategy by learning through small, fast, intelligent bets, turning uncertainty into evidence that informs your next big action.

The Reality Check: Isn’t This Over-engineering?

A common objection is that this framework creates more processes. The opposite is true. It replaces the endless, circular, low value meetings spent debating whose numbers are right and what the priority should be. It installs a clear, evidence based rhythm where consensus is built by design, not by argument.

It eliminates countless weeks spent on data requests for ad-hoc, out of the blue questions or "topics du jour" or massive board packs that need hours to read and hence don't get read.

The world’s most powerful AI models run on data, not opinions. As organisations increasingly look to leverage AI for a competitive edge, those without a clean, reliable data feedback loop connecting their strategy to their operations won’t just be left behind; they’ll be flying blind. Building your Execution Compass is no longer a strategic option; it’s the foundational work required to compete and win.

Over the next three weeks we’ll be posting deep dives into this topic to flesh out some of the details with examples. Keep an eye out for them!