The implementation gap, quantified

The number needs defending before it needs explaining, because 34% sounds like polemic. It is arithmetic: 214 programmes, each with a written value case at approval and a frozen month-0 baseline, audited at month 24 under a published verification standard. Self-reported outcomes — the figures most implementation statistics are built on — are excluded, because when we audit those, 44% fail basic tests.

So where do the other 66 points go? Not to bad strategy, mostly. When we decompose the gap, the strategy itself — wrong market, wrong economics — accounts for roughly a fifth of the loss. The rest is lost between the document and the operation, in four places we can now name and size.

The first leak is load: too many concurrent commitments, the single strongest predictor of failure in the dataset. The second is translation: strategies that never became operating decisions — no owner, no baseline, no date, so the operation politely continued as before. The third is latency: value that arrived so late its window had closed. The fourth is decay: results delivered, celebrated and quietly reabsorbed within a year because nothing held them.

In median shares of the missing value: load 31%, translation 27%, latency 22%, decay 20%. The precision matters less than the pattern — every leak is an operating-model failure, not an analytical one. The strategy was usually right. The organisation asked to carry it was usually never checked for load-bearing capacity.

The top quartile of the cohort delivers 71%, not 34%, and does nothing exotic to get there. Fewer commitments, drawn in phases. Every commitment translated into owners, baselines and dates before launch. A fixed cadence that reviews outcomes weekly. Independent verification before anything is called done. Each repair is dull; the compound effect is a doubling of delivered strategy.

The uncomfortable conclusion for strategy work — ours included — is that the marginal hour spent perfecting the answer is usually worth less than the marginal hour spent load-testing the organisation that must deliver it.