Six places where strategy execution fails
A COO, a CFO, a Chief Strategy Officer and a CPO can sit in the same executive meeting, look at the same problem and describe four entirely different things.
The COO sees delivery risk. The CFO sees a workforce cost that no longer matches financial envelope. Strategy sees an ambition beginning to slip. HR sees vacancies, skills gaps, succession exposure and a recruitment market that will not conveniently supply what the business has already promised.
Four vocabularies. One problem.
This matters because a company's workforce challenge stopped being an HR problem some time ago. PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey work reports that nearly a quarter of CEOs say talent shortages are already inhibiting performance, while 22% say their business is highly exposed to a lack of key skills. In addition, the World Economic Forum expects 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030.
Yet many organisations still respond through separate initiatives: a skills project this year, strategic workforce planning next year, succession somewhere else, a finance-led headcount exercise every autumn and, eventually, a workforce strategy to pull the story together.
I think that is the wrong approach and that there is a better way.
The failure is not one broken process. It is a system breaking at six predictable joins. Fixing one while ignoring the others is precisely why so much technically good work fails to change the impact of executive decisions.
1. Strategy never becomes a capability requirement
Most strategies say what the organisation wants to achieve. Far fewer say what it must be able to do differently to achieve it.
The distinction sounds small but it is not.
A growth plan might specify markets, investment, technology and revenue. A transformation plan might specify milestones, operating model and savings. But where is the workforce page that translates those choices into the capabilities, changed work, roles, skills, capacity and time-to-competence they require?
Without that translation, HR receives strategy as an instruction rather than helping test whether it is executable. Workforce planning starts downstream, often after location, technology, investment and delivery dates are already treated as fixed.
Adam Gibson’s work on Agile Workforce Planning makes the same underlying point: start with the capabilities the strategy requires, not simply the organisation you have today. The useful question is not “how many people do we need?” It is “what must we be able to do?”
2. There is no common language for capability
In an earlier in-house role, I worked in a global engineering organisation where scarce specialist capability was distributed across business units that described similar work in different ways.
One division’s role title did not reliably translate into another’s. Expertise existed, but the organisation could not see it consistently enough to redeploy it with confidence.
They did not lack talent. They lacked visibility.
This is why capability frameworks matter, but also why they so easily become expensive catalogues. A common language has to connect business capabilities, work, roles and skills in a form that leaders, managers, HR and Finance can actually use. It needs enough consistency to make comparison possible (internally and with external labour market) and enough pragmatism to survive contact with a real organisation.
If the taxonomy is owned only by HR, understood only by the project team and not used colloquially, in a resourcing or investment decision, people capability analysis falters and the taxonomy remains 'HR documentation'.
3. Planning is reactive, annual and spreadsheet-bound
There is nothing inherently wrong with a spreadsheet. There is something wrong with a planning process that becomes obsolete between the final action being checked and the executive team approving it.
Strategy moves. Technology moves. Labour markets move. Programmes slip. AI changes tasks faster than job descriptions are rewritten.
A workforce plan refreshed annually but relied on continuously is in the same boat and consequently carries an impossible burden. There is a better way.
The answer is not permanent forecasting theatre. It is a repeatable planning discipline: clear demand assumptions, credible supply views, scenarios, agreed triggers and a rhythm for revisiting decisions when evidence changes. Good SWP implementation is less about producing a definitive answer and more about creating insights that make the next decision better.
This is why “agile” matters. Not because planning should be lightweight, but because focussed scenarios often add more clarity than whole workforce plans and because making good enough decisions early is far better than perfect decisions late - certainty should never be mistaken for quality.
4. Planning is not truly collaborative, integrated across corporate functions: Finance, Strategy and Operations
This is the failure point I see most often.
Finance plans in one cycle. Strategy works to another horizon. Operations knows where delivery is hurting now. HR begins its workforce process when budget assumptions are already hardening. Then everyone wonders why the workforce plan struggles to influence decisions.
David Green has argued for some time for joint ownership of strategic workforce planning with the business and close collaboration with Finance, alongside a stronger link between workforce activity and business outcomes. That is the right direction.
Integrated Business Planning is not a meeting where HR is invited to present a people slide. It must offer shared assumptions, shared decision points and governance strong enough to surface a trade-off before it becomes a crisis.
Aligning planning events to time horizons therefore really matters - talking SWP in an operational planning context tends to be a lose-lose game and vice versa. Where IBP has been done well in my experience is where unconstrained (by budget) planning occurs in a strategic time horizon, supported by SWP - this is perfect territory for capability planning. Bringing the focus into next year and converting to planning that is constrained by budget is a vital middle ground. This is where the SWP rubber hits the road and where resource plans need to be tuned to budget and operational priorities. In year planning is more akin to workforce co-ordination, important for operational delivery and where the measure of effect for SWP should be derived.
Governance (or decision making from planning as I think it should be) sometimes gets described as bureaucracy. Done badly, it is. Done well, it creates buy-in, clarity and makes decisions stick. I briefed at the SWP Summit in March 26 that planning done well is both an art and a science: it is something to practice and develop. It is a shame that planning is often not as collaborative, integrated or organised as it could be as this underpins the rextent to which strategy execution succeeds.
5. Nobody knows which capability failure would hurt most
Criticality is one of the most overused words in talent management.
A senior role is not automatically a critical role. A scarce skill is not automatically a strategically critical capability. A vacancy is not automatically a risk.
Criticality is about consequence.
What happens if the capability is absent, concentrated in too few people, impossible to replace quickly or dependent on knowledge the organisation has never codified? Could the work be redesigned, automated, borrowed or stopped? What is the time to competence for a replacement?
Without that discipline, succession planning gravitates towards hierarchy and workforce risk towards vacancy volume. Both can miss the capability that would actually stop a programme, compromise a licence to operate or make a strategic commitment impossible. A good criticality exercise changes where leaders look. It moves the conversation from “who is important?” to “where are we genuinely exposed?”
The gold plate solution is to then combine criticality insights with SWP supply and demand trends over time to create genuine insights for workforce and strategies and resourcing investment decisions. Only here can you concretely make decisions today for capability tomorrow where there is clarity around the impact on future value and risk mitigation.
6. The workforce strategy exists, but nobody outside HR believes it
This is the most uncomfortable failure because the document can be excellent.
The analysis is sound. The options are thoughtful. The workforce strategy has been through the HR leadership team and the slides are finished.
Then the CFO asks where the assumptions came from. The COO disagrees with the demand forecast. A business leader says the capability model does not reflect how the work is really done.
The document has an HR owner, but not organisational ownership.
McKinsey’s organisational-redesign research found that only 21% of efforts in its survey both met their objectives and improved company performance. Leadership alignment, clear criteria, communication and attention to how work changes were among the strongest differentiators; success was four times more likely where senior leaders developed their own narratives for the change than where there was no formal communication. McKinsey later developed its reorganisation work in ReOrg, published by Harvard Business Review Press.
One system, not six projects
These six failure points are also the six areas I focus on through Cello: Capability Mapping; Capability Framework Design; SWP Implementation & Enablement; Integrated Business Planning Optimisation; Criticality Exercises; and Workforce Strategy Design.
I do not see them as six services to be bought independently. They are connected parts of a People Capability Management system.
Weakness in one limits the others. A sophisticated framework without planning becomes a catalogue. SWP without integration becomes an HR forecast. Criticality without strategy becomes a risk list. A workforce strategy without evidence and executive ownership becomes a document.
For CPOs and Heads of HR, that creates a different mandate. The job is not to own every workforce decision. It is to create the system through which Strategy, Finance, Operations, Technology and HR can make those decisions together, with a common language, better evidence and enough agility to change course.
Because strategy rarely fails in one dramatic moment. More often, it stops becoming reality somewhere in the joins.
Chris Woodward is the founder and Managing Director of Cello Consulting - a strategic HR advisory company that supports Chief People Officers and wider Execs secure and develop high performing talent, optimise workforce planning capabilities and drive organisational effectiveness.