The illusion of the execution problem.
12 min read
In São Paulo, eighteen months ago, I sat through a country review that lasted four hours and solved nothing.
The regional numbers had missed for the third quarter running. The global team had flown in. The country head had prepared forty-seven slides. By slide nine, the diagnosis was already locked in: execution. The local team was not moving fast enough. The field force had not adopted the new segmentation model. The launch cadence was wrong. The KPIs were right. The people were not delivering against them.
Nobody in the room asked what the strategy had assumed about the market it was entering. Nobody asked whether the segmentation model had been pressure-tested against how physicians in Brazil actually make prescribing decisions. It had almost nothing to do with how they make them in Germany, where the model was built.
Nobody asked because the strategy had been approved eight months earlier, at a level above this room, by people who were not in this room. And the unspoken rule in a country review is: the strategy is settled. We are here to discuss execution.
I have watched this scene more times than I can count.
The affiliate in Jakarta where the plan assumed a reimbursement pathway that did not exist in the country. Every quarterly miss was attributed to “access execution.” The launch in Turkey where the medical affairs plan was built for a KOL landscape that had restructured six months before the plan was approved. The business unit in Shanghai where the commercial model assumed a hospital-level purchasing pattern that had been replaced by a regional tendering system two years earlier. The review still concluded with an action item to “improve execution discipline.”
You know this. If you have ever sat in a review where the word “execution” was used more than five times in the first hour, you know that the word has stopped meaning anything. It has become the room’s way of saying: something is wrong, and we have agreed not to look at the part we cannot easily change.
For a long time, I thought this was a planning problem. If we could just get better market data, better local input into the global plan, better assumption-testing before approval, the strategy would arrive ready, and execution would follow.
I was wrong.
The strategy arrives already protected. The approval process has turned it into an object that cannot be questioned without questioning the people who approved it. And once that is true, every gap between what was planned and what happened has only one permissible explanation: the people at the edge did not execute well enough.
The strategy is not failing the market. The system is failing the strategy.
The system has taught everyone in the review room what the review room is for — and it is not for reopening the assumptions that sit above it. The review is a performance of accountability directed downward. The strategy sits above the room, untouched.
And the country head knows this. Which is why the forty-seven slides exist. Not to explain what happened. To absorb the impact of what was always going to be called an execution gap.
Better dashboards do not fix it. More granular KPIs do not fix it. Flying in more often does not fix it — although people will tell you it helped for about a quarter.
What actually changes it is something smaller — and stranger.
A Lever.
A micro-structural shift in how the review itself is conducted, so that the room becomes a place where the strategy’s assumptions can be tested against the reality they landed in. Without anyone losing face. One Lever. Chosen carefully. Applied consistently. Over a year, the reviews start producing decisions instead of slide decks.
So we built a Sprint for it. A short, structured Arena Sprint in which a leadership team walks a live execution gap back to the strategic assumption that created it — on a real market, with real numbers on the table — and watches, together, what happens when the review room becomes a room where the strategy is allowed to learn.
If you have ever left a country review knowing that the real problem was never discussed — and that everyone in the room knew it —
You already know where the gap is. It is closeable.