A bottom-line miss begins as a clarity miss and compounds until it reaches the number.
Why it matters when the plan changes
The gap is diagnosed late because it does not present as itself. It arrives as a slow decision, a commercial conflict, a struggling executive or a missed milestone, each of which has an obvious first explanation about a person. Those explanations are hypotheses worth testing, and they are treated as findings, which is why the same gap is rediscovered every year. The organisation must reinterpret thousands of decisions that a new plan makes obsolete, and attention stays where it was built until something forces it to move.
The tension is that closing it is not a communication problem. More cascades of the same message do not change which decisions people can make, what they are measured on, or which forum settles a contested call. The gap closes when those change, and they are harder to move than a slide. Execution breaks first at the interfaces between units rather than down a reporting line, because horizontal commitments are the least reliable part of any plan.
In practice
A company announces a shift to fewer, larger bets. Six months on, the initiative count has grown. Nobody defied the strategy; each addition was justified locally against a target that had not changed. The plan asked for fewer bets and the measurement system still paid for more.
Evidence
Most managers do not believe the stated strategic priorities are resourced, which is what a plan looks like when it has not reached the conditions people work under.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)Execution breaks across units rather than down the line, which is why the gap shows first at interfaces.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)
What it cannot tell you
The term names a distance, not a cause. It does not tell you which of the five clarities failed, whether the break sits at direction, priority, role, ownership or an interface between units. Treating it as a single diagnosis rather than a location to find can lead straight back to the discipline explanation it was meant to replace.
Questions
Rarely. Discipline explains why a clear instruction goes unfollowed, but Donald Sull's Harvard Business Review research found only 11% of managers believe their company's strategic priorities are properly resourced, which shows the failure is usually one of translation reaching the conditions people work under, not discipline.
Because it presents as something else. A slow decision looks like a pace problem, a missed milestone like weak delivery. Each has a plausible first explanation pointing at a person, and those explanations are usually accepted rather than tested against the alternative.
Changing what the organisation actually runs on: which priorities are resourced, who holds which decision, what the forums review, what the measures pay for. Communication makes the plan known. Those five change what people can do, which is a different lever.
At interfaces, because commitments between units are the least reliable part of any plan. Sull's Harvard Business Review study found only 9% of managers can rely on colleagues in other functions all the time, which is where the first slip appears, ahead of any financial number.
By reading the plan against the five things it depends on: direction, priority, role, ownership and dependency. Each is either present or absent and each absence is observable, which makes the gap locatable rather than a general statement about execution being hard.