Strategy names the bet and people work keeps the system running; the step between them is often owned by no one.
Why it matters when the plan changes
A new strategy is usually written in the language of markets, economics and advantage. The people function works in the language of hiring, development, capability and succession. Both are necessary, and neither is set up to say what a named team must now do differently. Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull found that only about half of middle managers could name any of their company's top five priorities, one sign that the step between the two often goes missing.
The tension is that closing the gap looks like someone else's job from both sides. Strategy teams hand over a direction and consider the work done; people teams wait for a brief that says what the direction means for roles. The gap closes only when someone owns the middle step: what must become different in the organisation, and who carries it.
In practice
A retailer commits to a subscription model. The strategy deck sets targets for recurring revenue; the people plan for the year still budgets store hiring and a leadership programme designed before the change. Nobody has written down that category managers must now decide on retention offers, or who they escalate to when a subscription offer conflicts with a store promotion.
Evidence
In a study of nearly 8,000 managers, only about half of middle managers could name any of their company's top five priorities.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)Only 9% of managers said they could rely on colleagues in other functions and units all the time.
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 translation gap names where a strategy can stall between intent and roles. It does not say which team, decision or dependency is affected in a given case, and a gap on paper may already be closed informally by capable people who absorb it.
How Atlas reads it
The translation runs in three steps: the strategic shift, what must become different in the organisation, and what people must now decide, learn, own or stop. The middle step is the one most often left unowned. Atlas is designed to strengthen that translation. It does not replace strategy, leadership or the people function.
Questions
Usually no one, which is the point of the name. Strategy owns the direction and the people function owns the conditions of work. The step between them needs an owner of its own. In a study of nearly 8,000 managers, Donald Sull and his co-authors found commitments across units far less reliable than those within them.
As managers who agree with the strategy but cannot say what it asks of them. Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull reported in 2015 that only about half of middle managers could name any of their company's top five priorities, and that only 9% could rely on colleagues in other functions all the time.
Not alone. The people function can build capability, adjust roles and support leaders, but it cannot decide what the strategy requires of each team. That judgement belongs with the leaders who own the plan, working with the people function rather than handing it a brief and waiting.
The lag is the interval in which the old logic keeps running after a new strategy arrives. The translation gap is one reason the lag lasts: until someone states what must become different, the priorities, incentives and habits built for the previous strategy have nothing to change towards.
Stating the change as observable work: which decisions move, which dependencies now matter, what stops. A strategy is not translated until people can tell what they must decide differently on Monday. Then a named owner checks, at an agreed point, whether those decisions have actually moved.