Most leadership teams spend considerable time trying to make strategy clear. They debate priorities, agree objectives, prepare presentations, cascade targets and develop KPIs. Once the strategy has been communicated, there is often an understandable assumption that the organisation is aligned.
But that assumption can be dangerously misleading.
A founder may tell the organisation that its priority is profitable growth. The sales director hears a requirement to increase revenue from existing customers. Marketing interprets it as acquiring higher-value customers. Operations assumes it means improving productivity and reducing the cost of delivery. Finance concludes that low-margin work should be stopped. Each person may genuinely believe they are following the same strategy, yet their decisions could pull the organisation in different directions.
The problem is not necessarily that the strategy has been communicated badly. It may be that the strategy has been interpreted differently.
This distinction matters because strategic alignment is not achieved when everybody has heard the same message. It is achieved when people develop a sufficiently shared understanding of that message to make coherent decisions when the leader is not in the room. The space between those two conditions is what I describe as the strategy interpretation gap.
We have focused heavily on communicating strategy
The problem of strategy execution is hardly new. Harvard Business Review, McKinsey, MIT Sloan Management Review and other management journals have examined it repeatedly. The recurring themes are familiar: leaders must establish clear priorities, communicate them effectively, connect strategy to everyday work, align incentives and ensure that people understand both what the organisation is trying to achieve and why it matters.
Academic research provides an even deeper perspective. Work on organisational sensemaking shows that people do not simply receive information and then act upon it objectively. They interpret information through the circumstances in which they work, the problems they face, their previous experiences, their professional responsibilities and their perception of what matters (Schneider, 1997).
As Maitlis and Christianson (2014) argue, sensemaking is fundamentally social where individuals construct meaning collaboratively through their organisational contexts, not in isolation (A. P. Andrew D. Brown Ian Colville, 2014).
Research into strategic consensus and shared mental models reinforces the same point. Organisations do not create alignment merely by exposing everyone to the same information (Duchek, 2019). People need sufficiently compatible interpretations of priorities, trade-offs and desired outcomes if their individual decisions are to combine into coherent organisational action.
Gittell’s research on relational coordination demonstrates that shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect among organisational members lead to high levels of coordination and positive performance effects (Duchek, 2019).
Yet much managerial practice still treats strategy implementation as if it follows a relatively simple sequence (Laura J. Damschroder, 2009). The pattern has always been the same. Strategy is developed, then that strategy is communicated, objectives are then cascaded where execution follows.
When execution falls short, it has always gone back to communicating effectively. So leaders have always tried to communicate harder, clarify the presentation, strengthen accountability or invariably add another layer of measurement. When we look at the science of implementation, we can see that approximately two-thirds of organizations’ efforts to implement change fail precisely because they rely on linear transmission models rather than attending to interpretive processes (Laura J. Damschroder, 2009).
That model misses something important.
A more realistic sequence is strategy, communication, interpretation, local meaning, decisions, behaviour and execution.
I have always observed that things slip between what leaders say and what employees do.
It relies on an interpretive process that can fundamentally alter the meaning of the original strategy. I have seen Leaders talk about growth and sales people think of revenue, marketing thinks of visibility, HR thinks of upskilling.
Now these middle managers in particular, play a critical role as “translators” of strategy, enacting leadership through performing conversations and setting scenes that allow people from different organisational levels to engage with strategic change (Linda Rouleau, 2010).
That is the gap we need to pay more attention to.
The missing variable is interpretation
Suppose a leadership team announces that customer retention is now a strategic priority. At senior level, that statement may be supported by detailed analysis of acquisition costs, lifetime value, profitability, customer segments and competitive pressures.
By the time that same priority reaches different parts of the organisation, however, its meaning can change.
Marketing may interpret retention as improving customer communications. Customer service may conclude that response times have to improve. Sales may think it means increasing account-management activity. Finance may focus on protecting margins on existing customers. Product teams may prioritise fixing defects. Operations may assume that delivery reliability is the critical issue.
When it comes to middle managers, this doesn’t necessarily translate well when confusing interpretations creep in. When they try to interpret without understanding the context and then add their view of the world to that interpretation, the gap starts widening on what is intended to what is communicated and what would be executed as a result. These gaps are not visible but can cause tectonic shifts on how things get done.
All of these interpretations could be reasonable. The question is whether they combine into a coherent response. This is why asking, “Have we communicated our priorities clearly?” is not enough. That question evaluates what the leader transmitted.
It tells us very little about what the organisation received. Communication failures represent a significant barrier to effective implementation in organizations (Laura J. Damschroder, 2009). Strategic communication must be understood as more than messaging. It functions as a social process through which stakeholders construct meaning, credibility, and acceptance (Mety Titin Herawaty, 2026).
The more useful question is: “What do people believe this strategic priority actually means for the decisions they make?”
There is a profound difference between the two. The first encourages leaders to improve the message. The second requires leaders to investigate meaning. Leaders can therefore mistake familiarity for alignment. Employees may know the strategic priorities. They may recognise the language used in company presentations.
They may even be able to repeat the objectives accurately. None of this guarantees that they have interpreted those objectives in ways that produce consistent action. This phenomenon called discrepant sensemaking tends to occur when team members make meaning from shared experiences in fundamentally different ways, driven by their idiosyncratic identity construction and the narratives they tell about their work (J. N. Andrew D. Brown P Stacey, 2008).
The strategic bottleneck may therefore be neither poor communication nor poor execution. It may be unexamined interpretation. Implementation science frameworks emphasise that alignment requires attention to organisational culture, compatibility of the strategy with existing workflows and values, and clarity of expectations (Laura J. Damschroder, 2009).
Leaders must become interpreters of interpretations
This changes the leadership task.
We usually describe senior leaders as communicators of strategy. They must articulate where the organisation is going, why it matters and what the priorities are. That remains essential. But leadership responsibility cannot end when the presentation finishes.
Leaders also need to become interpreters of interpretations.
They need to discover what happened to the strategy after it left the boardroom. What did sales think it meant? What did operations hear? What assumptions did managers make about the trade-offs involved? What did employees believe they were expected to stop doing? What happens when two strategic priorities compete for the same resources?
These are not merely communication questions. They reveal whether the organisation shares a sufficiently common strategic logic.
This becomes particularly important as companies grow. In a small business, interpretation errors are often corrected almost automatically. The founder is nearby. People ask questions. Decisions are discussed informally. Confusion can be resolved relatively quickly.
As the organisation scales, distance develops between strategic intention and operational action. The founder communicates with senior leaders. Senior leaders translate the strategy for managers. Managers interpret it for teams. Teams convert that interpretation into thousands of individual choices. Senior management teams, when implementing strategic change across distributed operations, often function as distinct interpretive communities rather than homogeneous change agents, with each subgroup constructing narratives that reflect their locally differentiated contexts and relational positions (Julia Balogun, 2015).
At every stage, strategy is not simply being transmitted. It is being translated.
This translation process is particularly critical in the middle management layer, where strategy implementation can either be strengthened or undermined through how middle managers frame and communicate strategic priorities to frontline staff (Jan Kiehne, 2017).
Small differences in interpretation can therefore accumulate as strategy moves through the organisation. The CEO may believe there is one strategy while, operationally, the company is running several slightly different versions of it. Research on multi-level implementation demonstrates that coordination mechanisms and shared understanding across organisational levels are essential to achieve what scholars call “whole-system response” to strategic priorities (Duchek, 2019).
The importance of staying at the same altitude
This is where an idea from my friend Rahim Hirji’s work on SuperSkills in the age of AI becomes particularly useful. Rahim uses the concept of altitude to describe the ability to move between different levels of perspective: zooming out to understand the wider system and zooming in to understand what is happening closer to the action.
The concept has powerful implications for strategic alignment.
Senior leaders naturally spend much of their time at a higher organisational altitude. They think about markets, competitors, technology, investment, organisational capability, shareholder expectations, risk and long-term direction. This altitude is necessary because leaders need to see connections that may not be visible from one department or operational role.
Employees frequently operate at a very different altitude. They experience customers, systems, processes, workloads, deadlines, targets, staffing constraints and conflicting requests. They encounter the practical consequences of decisions that may look perfectly logical at senior level.
A strategy can therefore look very different depending on the altitude from which it is viewed. Neither perspective is automatically right or wrong. They represent different views of the same organisation.
The problem emerges when leaders attempt to understand the perspectives of employees while remaining entirely at their own altitude. A decision that appears irrational from the boardroom may make complete sense when viewed through the constraints facing an operational manager. Conversely, something that appears essential at the frontline may make less sense when seen against the wider strategic context.
Effective leaders therefore have to become comfortable changing altitude. They need to zoom out to see the system and then zoom in to understand how that system is actually being experienced.
Coming to the same altitude as employees does not mean abandoning strategic leadership. Nor does it mean micromanagement. It means temporarily occupying the perspective from which another person is making a decision. This practice aligns with what researchers call perspective-taking, the ability to understand how situations appear from different organisational vantage points and to appreciate the constraints and pressures others face (Yuli Zhang, 2018).
A goal that seems perfectly clear at 30,000 feet may look ambiguous at 3,000 feet. A strategy that sounds compelling in the boardroom can become contradictory when it collides with operational reality. Studies on high-reliability organizations demonstrate that understanding these different perspectives is not a luxury but a necessity for effective decision-making under uncertainty (Duchek, 2019).
The leadership question therefore changes from, “Why aren’t people following the strategy?” to something far more useful: “What does this strategy look like from where they are standing?”
This reframing reflects what implementation science calls the need for leaders to engage in “sensegiving” by actively helping organisational members construct meaning that integrates strategic intent with operational reality (A. Bertolini, 2026).
STRATEGIQ: making different interpretations visible
This challenge of interpretation is one of the reasons I developed the STRATEGIQ board game.
Traditional strategy conversations often begin with the leadership team’s perspective. Someone presents the strategy, participants discuss it and the meeting then moves towards implementation. The inherent danger is that the conversation becomes anchored around the interpretation of the most senior people in the room.
Employees and managers may agree with what they hear without revealing that they understand the organisation, its constraints or its priorities quite differently.
STRATEGIQ reverses that process.
Rather than beginning by telling people what the strategy should be, the board game creates a structured environment in which participants first make their own perspectives visible. They explore what they see as the organisation’s priorities, opportunities, constraints, blockers and accelerators. The discussion begins with interpretation rather than instruction.
That difference is important.
Two people can agree that growth is the priority while disagreeing fundamentally about what is preventing it. One may believe the constraint is sales capability. Another may see operational capacity as the real issue. Someone closer to customers may believe the underlying problem is customer experience. A fourth person may identify the founder’s continuing involvement in every major decision as the true bottleneck.
If these interpretations remain hidden, the organisation can appear aligned while behaving in contradictory ways.
STRATEGIQ brings those interpretations into the room.
Participants work through their individual views before moving towards a collective understanding. They can see where their perspectives overlap, where they diverge and where apparently common language disguises fundamentally different assumptions.
This is where some of the most valuable conversations emerge. Leadership teams and employees can discover that they have been using the same words while attaching different meanings to them. Once those differences become visible, the purpose of the conversation changes. It is no longer about persuading everybody to accept the senior team’s interpretation. It becomes a process of understanding the organisation collectively.
The result is not simply greater agreement. It is greater clarity about what matters, what is preventing progress and what needs to happen next.
That distinction between agreement and alignment is important.
STRATEGIQ is not designed to eliminate different perspectives. Quite the opposite. Those perspectives are valuable data.
Someone in finance should see the organisation differently from someone in customer service. A founder should have a different vantage point from a frontline employee. If everyone arrived with exactly the same perspective, the organisation would lose valuable information.
The objective is therefore not to force everyone to think alike. It is to surface the differences, understand what sits behind them and then develop enough shared meaning for people to act coherently.
Moving between altitudes together
The STRATEGIQ process also demonstrates what changing altitude can look like in practice.
A CEO may enter the conversation thinking about market growth, investment and competitive positioning. An operational manager may be focused on capacity constraints. A customer-facing employee may see frustration that is largely invisible in management information. A finance director may recognise that some of the opportunities being discussed cannot meet the required economic returns.
Rather than asking one group to adopt the perspective of another, the process allows these different altitudes to be explored together.
Leadership provides strategic context. Employees provide operational context. Customers may be represented through their experiences and feedback. Financial information adds another layer. The organisation gradually develops a richer picture than any single perspective could provide.
That shared picture matters because action becomes easier when people understand not only what has been prioritised but why it matters, what is blocking progress and how their own decisions contribute to the outcome.
This is where strategy stops being something that belongs to the leadership team and starts becoming something the organisation can actually act upon.
My experience of using STRATEGIQ has reinforced a lesson that I believe is easy to miss: alignment is not the absence of different perspectives. Alignment is what happens when those perspectives have been surfaced, understood and translated into sufficiently shared meaning to support coordinated action.
This finding resonates with organisational resilience research, which demonstrates that organizations that successfully implement strategic change are those that can create diversity in perspectives through constructive conflict and deeper discussions about actions to take, while maintaining sufficient coordination to act coherently (Duchek, 2019).
Why AI may make this issue more important
The arrival of AI makes the distinction between communication and interpretation even more important. Organisations are becoming extraordinarily efficient at creating and distributing information. A strategic plan can quickly become a presentation, departmental briefing, video, dashboard, management summary and employee communication. AI can translate strategy for different audiences and help managers turn objectives into suggested tasks.
These capabilities are useful.
But faster communication should not be confused with better alignment.
AI can ensure that everybody receives the same document. It cannot guarantee that everybody attaches the same meaning to it.
In fact, organisations could become very good at distributing strategic language without becoming any better at understanding how that language is interpreted. There is therefore a genuine risk that AI enables organisations to automate the distribution of ambiguity.
The wrong interpretation simply travels faster.
This is why the human capabilities Rahim Hirji highlights become increasingly important in an AI-enabled workplace. Perspective-taking, curiosity, judgement and the ability to move between different levels of context become more and not less valuable. Research on organisational sensemaking during technological change confirms that employees actively interpret new technologies and organisational communications through their particular workplace contexts, and that meaning-making is essential to successful adoption (Yihang Yan, 2025).
AI can help us distribute information. Leaders must still discover what meaning that information has created. Strategic communication about organisational change must be dialogic and trust-based, not merely transactional, to ensure that the intended meaning is actually received and internalized by organisational members (Mety Titin Herawaty, 2026).
One action: run an Altitude Alignment Conversation
You do not need a major strategy review to discover whether an interpretation gap exists in your organisation. You can start with one simple exercise.
Choose five to ten people from different levels and functions of the business. Speak to each person independently and ask three questions:
What do you believe is the single most important goal for the business right now?
What does that goal require you or your team to do differently?
What should we stop, deprioritise or say no to because of it?
The most important part is what happens next.
Do not immediately correct anyone.
Do not explain what the strategy is supposed to mean.
Do not tell people whether their interpretation is right or wrong.
Listen.
For a few minutes, stay at their altitude.
Then place the answers alongside one another.
If people name broadly the same objective but describe completely different implications for action, you have identified an interpretation gap.
If they agree about what needs to start but disagree about what must stop, your organisation may have a prioritisation problem.
If senior leaders consistently give one interpretation while frontline employees give another, you may have discovered an altitude gap between strategic intention and operational reality.
Those differences are not failures. They are the data you need to create alignment.
The purpose of the exercise is therefore not to test whether employees can repeat the strategy. It is to determine whether people are using sufficiently compatible interpretations of the strategy when making decisions about time, money, customers, priorities and resources. Implementation science calls this “fidelity with adaptation”, ensuring that while delivery may vary by context, the core strategic intent is preserved (María E. Fernández, 2019).
That is a much more demanding test of strategic clarity. Research on implementation effectiveness demonstrates that achieving this level of strategic alignment significantly improves organisational performance and implementation outcomes (Gregory A. Aarons, 2010).
It is also much closer to the reality of strategy execution. When organizations invest in surfacing and aligning interpretations of strategy, they demonstrate markedly better performance on implementation outcomes including reach, fidelity, and sustainability (Daniel N Elakpa, 2026).
The real test of strategic clarity
Organisations do not execute strategy documents. They execute thousands of decisions made every day by people throughout the business.
Those decisions are influenced not by the strategy as it exists in the mind of the founder, CEO or board, but by the meaning employees have attached to it.
This is why communicating strategy repeatedly does not automatically produce alignment. Leaders need to understand what happens after communication. They need to surface interpretation, expose differences and create sufficient shared meaning for people to act coherently.
That requires movement between altitudes and what scholars call “relational coordination”, achieving alignment through respectful face-to-face dialogues rooted in trust, honesty, and mutual respect (Duchek, 2019).
Leaders need the perspective that comes from standing above the organisation and seeing the wider system. But they must also be willing to come down to the altitude of the people who encounter customers, processes, systems and operational constraints every day.
This requires what implementation science identifies as “leadership engagement”, genuine commitment and accountability to understanding and supporting frontline implementation challenges (Laura J. Damschroder, 2009).
STRATEGIQ has shown me how powerful it can be when leadership teams and employees make those different perspectives visible and use them to develop a shared picture of what really matters. The goal is not uniform thinking. The goal is coherent action. Organisational resilience research confirms that organizations relying on shared decision-making and decentralization, where all members feel both the discretion and responsibility for ensuring organisational interests, demonstrate superior implementation capacity (Duchek, 2019).
Perhaps the most useful test of your strategy is therefore a very simple one.
If you independently asked ten people in your organisation what your most important strategic goal means for the decisions they will make tomorrow, would you hear essentially the same strategy?
If not, your problem may not be that people have failed to listen.
It may be that nobody has yet examined how differently they are interpreting what they heard.
Strategic alignment does not require everyone to see the organisation from the same perspective. It requires leaders to surface those perspectives, move between organisational altitudes and create enough shared meaning for people to make coherent decisions and act.
References
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A very good analysis of the common mismatch of understanding and interpretation… the graveyard of many good boardroom strategies?