Strategy Fails Because People Stop Believing They’re Part of It

Across companies and countries I keep noticing the same thing. It’s not that people can’t think strategically. It’s that they don’t bother anymore.

Why would they?

Most employees, even smart, senior ones, have been trained by experience to stay in their lane:

·      Strategy is decided somewhere else.

·      Their role is to “execute,” not to question or reshape it.

·      When they did try to think differently at some point, no one listened. Or worse, they were punished for it.

So over time, people do what humans do best: they adapt.

They stop pushing. They inherit processes. They follow the template. They work inside the system rather than shaping it.

Not because they’re lazy. But because it’s rational.

And then we ask these same people to lead “strategic projects” without training, without authority, without ownership.

And we’re surprised when:

·      Projects drift.

·      Decisions get postponed.

·      Strategy quietly dissolves into inertia and “this is how we’ve always done it.”

The problem isn’t intelligence. It’s agency. It’s that people were never invited, or equipped, to own strategy.

If companies want strategy to land, they must do more than cascade slides. They must rebuild belief that people are not just executors of someone else’s plan, but architects of it.

Teach them. Trust them. Let them challenge you.

Because strategy doesn’t die for lack of thinking. It dies when thinking feels pointless.