Posted on October 7th, 2025.

Why your plan isn’t working—and what to do before Q4 ends the same way it started.

Most strategic plans don’t fail in a blaze. They decay quietly. Piece by piece.

A planning retreat ends with energy. There’s consensus, alignment, motivation. And then reality resumes. Client escalations. Staff departures. Missed sales numbers. The plan doesn’t get abandoned. It just gets pushed to next week. Again.

Fast-forward two quarters, and the story's familiar:

• The vision is still technically intact.
• The dashboards look fine.
• The language hasn't changed.

But nothing compounds. Nothing shifts. Your strategy becomes theater: visible, but non-functional.

That’s the Strategy Gap.

It's the space between vision and execution. And it widens when leaders assume strategy runs on clarity, when it really runs on cadence.

Execution is not an event. It’s a system.

Leadership teams often mistake clarity for momentum. A good strategy deck, a set of goals, a town hall update—none of it builds traction without operational gravity.

Here’s what you need to build that gravity:

1. Pick 1 or 2 Wildly Important Goals (WIGs).

Too many goals means no priority. That might feel like discipline, but it’s just diffusion.

Example: If your annual theme is "Margin Expansion," but your team is juggling seventeen initiatives (pricing reviews, client segmentation, account transitions, new service lines, org chart updates), you're not expanding margin. You're exhausting people.

Cut until the outcome becomes obvious. Focus multiplies impact.

2. Build lead measures. Not just lag dashboards.

A lagging indicator tells you what already happened: revenue, churn, customer sat. It helps for diagnostics, not direction.

A lead measure, by contrast, tells you what actions predict success. If you're aiming for a 10% bump in NRR, track how often CSMs complete QBRs. If your goal is EBITDA growth, track decisions that cut OPEX per revenue hour.

If you can’t influence it directly, it’s not a lead measure. And if you're not measuring behavior, you're not leading execution.

3. Create a weekly rhythm. Make it non-negotiable.

Every team needs a heartbeat. Without it, plans dissolve into hopeful to-do lists. Create a 30-minute cadence: review key lead measures, remove blockers, re-commit to priorities.

This is not a status meeting. It's an execution checkpoint.

Example: At a client MSP, we installed a simple Monday rhythm: review WIGs, surface customer issues, align ops/sales handoffs. One hour, standing agenda, zero exceptions. That rhythm doubled project throughput in two quarters.

Common signs you have a strategy gap:

• Strategic goals get airtime only at quarterly offsites.
• Progress depends on heroic effort, not structural support.
• Middle managers can’t explain how their week connects to company priorities.
• You track KPIs, but rarely course-correct.

If any of these feel familiar, you're not alone. But you're not stuck.

Execution isn’t magic. It’s rhythm, structure, and guts. Build it like a system, not a slogan.

Call to Action

Stop admiring the gap. Start closing it.

JP Van Steerteghem

Call me at +1-617-548-3863

or email me at [email protected]

or schedule some time https://calendly.com/jvansteerteghem