Ninety-seven per cent of the senior leaders at one large technology company told their annual engagement survey that they clearly understood the company’s priorities and how their own work contributed. The chief executive was pleased, and reasonably so. There were five priorities, they had not changed in two years, and she communicated them regularly.
Researchers then asked those same leaders to list the five. A quarter could name three of them. A third could not name one (MIT Sloan Management Review, Sull, Turconi, Sull and Yoder, “No One Knows Your Strategy, Not Even Your Top Leaders”).
The instinct on seeing a result like that is to book another town hall and send a clearer email. The same research suggests that is close to the least useful response available.
The drop happens one level below the top
The pattern holds well beyond one company. Across 124 organisations, 28 per cent of the executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three of their organisation’s priorities (MIT Sloan Management Review, Sull et al.). Most businesses fall a long way short on strategic alignment, and most of them do not know it, because the surveys they run measure how understood people feel rather than what they can name.
The interesting part is where the number falls off. You would expect a gentle decline down the hierarchy, or a cliff at the front line. It goes the other way. In the typical organisation studied, just over half of the top team converged on the same list of objectives. Among the people who report directly to that top team, the figure was 22 per cent (MIT Sloan Management Review, Sull et al.).
Half of a board-level team not agreeing on what the company is trying to do is uncomfortable. What follows is worse, because those direct reports are the people who write the departmental plans, set the budgets and decide what their teams work on all year.
What this actually looks like in a meeting
Here is my own reading of it, and it goes further than the research does.
The visible symptom is not confusion. Confusion would be easier, because someone would ask. The symptom is an argument that will not resolve. Operations wants one thing, sales wants another, finance wants a third, and every one of them can defend their position competently against the objective as written. Nobody is being difficult. Nobody is protecting territory. They are each producing a correct answer to a question that was asked loosely enough to have several.
A goal stated with precision narrows the number of defensible plans that follow from it. A goal stated loosely leaves that number wide open, and the room then spends the afternoon discovering how wide. It is usually read as a personality problem, or as a sign that the team needs to work on trust. In my experience it is a specification problem, and it is fixed upstream of the room.
The uncomfortable half of this
The honest complication is that most of those competing plans will work.
A less than optimal choice is not automatically a loss-making one. If four directors each arrive with a coherent plan built from the same loose objective, the likelihood is that three of them would deliver an acceptable result, and possibly all four. That is precisely why the argument does not settle itself. When one option is wrong, the room finds out within twenty minutes. When all the options are defensible and only one of them can be resourced, the discussion can run for two years, which is roughly how long these things do run.
An argument that never resolves is a reliable sign that the goal underneath it admits more than one right answer, and a poor guide to the quality of the team having it.
A worked example from a sector I know
Take a fibre network operator with the objective “grow the customer base”. Nobody would call that vague in the room. It has a verb, an object and an obvious direction.
At least three complete plans follow from it, and all three are legitimate. Build faster into new footprint, which is a capital and civils programme with a long payback. Raise take-up inside footprint already passed, which is a sales, service and pricing programme with a fast payback and a hard ceiling. Or buy a subscriber base, which is a corporate transaction requiring nobody in the operational leadership team to do anything at all.
Those three plans need different money, different people, different suppliers and different reporting. They can be sequenced, and they cannot be run simultaneously at full weight by a business of ordinary size. Each of their sponsors will be able to show that the plan grows the customer base, because each of them does.
I built and ran operations for a fibre broadband provider through its growth phase, and this is the standing argument in the sector. The objective as written cannot settle it, so it gets settled instead by whoever is most senior, most persistent or most recently vindicated, and it reopens quietly at the next planning cycle. Looking honestly at how a business actually decides things tends to find two or three of these running permanently.
The test that takes ten minutes
There is a plain test for whether an objective is specified well enough to be useful.
Give the goal, exactly as written, to two competent people who both know the business. Send them away separately. Ask each to produce the outline plan that follows from it. If the two plans come back materially the same, the goal is doing its job. If they come back different and both are defensible, the goal is the problem, and no amount of communicating it harder will change that.
Most management teams have never run this, and it costs an afternoon of two people’s time.
The tightening that follows is not complicated. Name the constraint the plan has to respect, because a goal without a constraint is a wish. Name what the business is willing to give up to get it, since that single sentence eliminates more competing plans than any other. Name the measure and the date. And name who decides when two plans both qualify, because that person exists whether or not anyone has said so, and leaving it unstated is what turns a decision into a standing argument.
What actually moves strategic alignment
The corrective in the study is quieter than it sounds and it is worth taking seriously.
Across 69 items in their execution survey, the single strongest predictor of strategic alignment was how consistently managers at every level explained why their team’s priorities mattered, both for their own unit and for the company as a whole. A company average on everything else and strong on that one behaviour would land in the top quartile (MIT Sloan Management Review, Sull et al.).
Note what that behaviour requires. To explain why your team’s priority matters for the whole company, you have to know what the company is trying to do, and you have to be able to trace a line from your work to it. Managers who cannot do that are usually not being lazy. They are being asked to connect their work to an objective that does not have a single line to connect to. Installing the habit of writing goals that survive that connection is slower than running a communications campaign and it is the thing that holds.
Before the next planning round
Most businesses will write next year’s objectives in the next couple of months, ahead of a Budget on 28 October and whatever it does to costs (CPA Business News, 10 August 2026). The temptation in an uncertain autumn is to keep the wording broad so the plan can flex.
Broad wording does not preserve flexibility. It transfers the decision from the people who wrote the objective to whoever happens to be in the room when the choice becomes unavoidable, usually in March, usually under pressure, and usually without the argument being written down anywhere. A business that holds together under conditions it did not choose is generally one where the hard choices were made in the calm months and recorded.
So take one objective from last year’s plan. Ask two of your directors, separately, what plan follows from it. If the answers differ and both are good, you have found something more useful than a disagreement.
References
- MIT Sloan Management Review. Donald Sull, Stefano Turconi, Charles Sull and James Yoder. “No One Knows Your Strategy, Not Even Your Top Leaders.” Read Article
- CPA. “UK Business News Today: 10 August 2026.” 10 August 2026. Read Article
