Great Strategy Dies in the Middle. Here's Why.

TL;DR:

• The 1% Problem: Less than 1% of people in any organization create strategy. 95% are responsible for executing it.

• The Missing Layer: Between those two groups sits a thin 3-4%, the Activator/Translator Layer, and most organizations have no idea how well it is functioning.

• The Translation Imperative: Your real strategy is not the plan. It is what your front line chooses to do every day.

• The Open Loop Advantage: Organizations that feed frontline learning back into strategy don't wait for the annual offsite to course-correct. They improve in real time.

The Line That Never Moved

My wife and I were on a ferry heading to Victoria a few weeks ago.

We joined the food line. It wasn't moving. We couldn't figure out why.

As we edged toward the front, it became clear.

The person taking orders was visibly struggling, slowly taking one order at a time, frequently crossing to the other side of the service area to find items that should have been within arm's reach.

His bins weren't stocked. His station wasn't ready. Nobody had set him up to succeed. And yet there he was, the front line of the customer experience, doing his best with what he had.

What happened next was what really got me.

A cook came out of the kitchen, not to improve the customer experience, but to check whether the bins were full. There was no discussion of what was missing to serve customers effectively, and no offer of help despite the patrons' obvious frustration in the long queue.

Next, a manager appeared. Not to support the struggling employee. Not to restock the station. The manager stood in the customer line and suggested people move to the other side, as if redistributing the queue was a solution rather than a redistribution of the problem.

Still, the lone person struggled. My wife wanted to shift lines, but I was glued to the unfolding drama.

Then the manager sent one of the cashiers on a break, at the height of food service, closing down one till. Two checkouts became one, and the queue grew longer. The two managers stood together beside the closed till, watching it all unfold, and chatted.

A thought occurred: did the CEO and his executive team sit around the strategy table and devise a plan to make the food line and checkout experience as slow and frustrating as possible? Probably not.

And yet every single behaviour I witnessed was executing exactly that strategy. The strategy was only as good as the front-line execution.

The Numbers That Should Worry You

Here is a data point I share in every strategy engagement I run, and it stops leaders cold every time.

Less than 1% of people inside an organization are in the room or at the retreat where strategy is created.

Approximately 3-4% of people are asked for input or data and are responsible for communicating and translating that strategy to the broader organization.

That means 95% of the people who are relied upon to execute the strategy have no part in its creation.

Read that again.

The people who created the strategy, the ones who understand the intent, the tradeoffs, and the reasoning behind every choice, represent less than 1% of the organization.

The people who are deciding what to do on a daily basis represent the 95%.

The only thing connecting those two groups is a thin layer of leaders, managers, and communicators in the middle. I call this the Activator/Translator Layer.

When that layer works, strategy flows. The intent of the 1% reaches the hands of the 95% with enough clarity, context, and support to be executed well.

When that layer breaks down, you get the food line.

The Activator/Translator Layer

The Activator/Translator Layer is not a job title. It is a function, and in most organizations, it is the least examined part of the entire strategy system.

Activators are the people who take strategic intent and turn it into specific priorities, plans, and behaviours for their teams.

They answer the question: What does this strategy mean for us, in our work, starting Monday?

Translators ensure the strategy's meaning doesn't get lost as it moves through the organization.

They close the gap between what leadership intended and what the front line understands. They are the ones who notice not only when the bins aren't stocked, but also when the right bins aren't there in the first place, and fix it before it becomes a queue.

On that ferry, the Activator/Translator Layer had completely lost the plot.

The manager who redirected the queue wasn't translating the strategy into action. They were managing a symptom.

The cook checking bins wasn't activating anything. They were executing a checklist.

Nobody in the middle was asking the right question: Does the person responsible for execution have what they need to succeed?

That question, simple as it sounds, is the entire job of the Activator/Translator Layer.

Why Leaders Get This Wrong

When front-line execution breaks down, the instinct is to look at the individual. Why is that employee so slow? Why didn't the manager intervene more effectively?

Those are the wrong questions because they treat execution as a linear set of steps in a closed loop: strategy, execution, KPIs, and success, reliant on individual skill.

The right question is: what did we design, or fail to design, that made this outcome inevitable?

This question approaches execution as an open-loop system where learning from the front line is fed back into the strategy and execution model to continually improve.

A strategy document is not a strategy. It is an intention.

The strategy is what actually happens when your 95% show up to work every day. And if what they do doesn't reflect what you intended, the failure almost always lives in the Activator/Translator Layer, not at the front line.

The front line executes what it is given. If they are given unclear priorities, insufficient tools, and managers focused on the wrong things, they will execute accordingly. Brilliantly, efficiently, and at scale.

When the inevitable failures are used as learning within an open-loop system, course correction happens in real time, not waiting until the next annual strategic offsite of the 1%.

Leadership Takeaways

• Audit the layer, not the line: When execution breaks down, look at your Activator/Translator Layer before you look at the 95%. That is almost always where the gap lives.

• Activating is not communicating: Sending a strategy deck is not translation. Your people need to know what the strategy means for their Monday morning, not their annual review.

• The 3-4% are your highest-leverage investment: A small improvement in how your Activator/Translator Layer functions has an outsized impact on everything the 95% produces.

• Close the loop or lose the learning: Execution without feedback is just repetition. Build the mechanism to bring frontline reality back to the strategy table before the next annual offsite.

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If closing the gap between your strategic intent and front-line execution is work you are doing right now, this is exactly what I help leadership teams build. You can learn more here.

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➡️ The Practical Step: Audit Your Activator/Translator Layer

Identify the 3-4% of people in your organization who sit between strategy creation and front-line execution. Then ask four questions about each of them:

Do they understand the strategy well enough to explain the reasoning behind it, not just the what, but the why?

Are they translating that strategy into specific behaviours and priorities for their teams, or are they passing the deck along and hoping it lands?

Do they have the proximity to the front line to know when something isn't working, and the authority to fix it?

Is there a mechanism for front-line learning to reach the people who set the strategy, or does insight stop at the Activator/Translator Layer and go no further?

If the answer to any of those is no, you don't have an execution problem. You have an Activator/Translator problem. And that is a leadership design problem, which means it is yours to solve.

Fix the layer. Then build the feedback loop that keeps it honest.

One practical way to start: once a quarter, put this on your senior management or executive meeting agenda as a standing item:

"What have we learned in the last quarter that should inform our strategy, and what do we need to shift?"

That one question, asked consistently, is the difference between a strategy that learns and a strategy that slowly becomes irrelevant.