Why do most group strategies quietly die by March?

Most group strategies die by March because nothing in the operating year is built to keep them alive. The plan is signed off in January, presented at a leadership offsite, and filed. By the end of Q1 every business unit is back to running on last year’s habits. Harvard Business Review research puts it plainly: 67 per cent of well-formulated strategies fail not because the thinking was wrong, but because execution never took hold. The problem is not intelligence. It is rhythm.

The document is not the strategy

A fifty-page strategy deck is a record of choices made in a room over two days. It is not an operating discipline. The moment it is printed it starts to age. Markets shift, competitors move, a key hire falls through. Nothing in a static document adapts to any of that.

What actually holds a strategy together through a year is a short, shared logic that every business unit can translate into its own priorities, paired with a cadence that forces progress reviews and real reallocation decisions at regular intervals.

What a working rhythm looks like

Research from Bain on high-performing companies shows that the best organisations close the strategy-execution gap by converting annual plans into quarterly operating cycles. The pattern is straightforward.

Quarterly. Each business reviews progress against its three to five strategic priorities. The review is not a status recitation. It is a decision meeting: what is working, what is not, and what resources need to move. McKinsey’s work on operating-model alignment suggests that companies willing to reallocate 5 to 10 per cent of resources every quarter outperform those that wait for the annual budget cycle.

Monthly. A lighter check on lead indicators. Are the inputs moving? If a strategic priority depends on hiring forty engineers by June and you have hired three by April, the quarterly review is too late.

Annually. The strategy itself is refreshed, not rewritten from scratch. The questions stay the same. The answers update.

Why groups are especially vulnerable

A single-business company can sometimes hold strategy through informal pressure and a strong CEO. A multi-business group cannot. The centre sets direction, but each business runs its own P&L, its own market, its own team. Without a shared framework and a shared calendar, twelve businesses will interpret the group strategy twelve different ways, or ignore it entirely.

The Harvard Business School blog notes that only 5 per cent of employees in a typical organisation can articulate the company’s strategy. In a diversified group, that number is almost certainly lower. The strategy is not failing because people disagree with it. It is failing because people have never absorbed it.

The fix is not a better plan

It is a shorter one. We have seen groups replace fifty-page strategies with a one-page OGSM (Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Measures) for each business, laddering up to the group’s. The format forces clarity and makes cascading possible.

But the format alone is not enough. What matters is the discipline around it: a quarterly review that every business CEO attends, where progress is reviewed against shared measures, where trade-offs are surfaced, and where the group CEO makes visible decisions about resource allocation.

A practical starting point

If your group strategy was signed off in January and you are reading this in March, ask three questions.

1. Can each business CEO write down the group’s top three priorities from memory?
2. Is there a scheduled quarterly review where strategic progress, not just financial performance, is on the agenda?
3. Has any resource been moved between businesses or priorities since the plan was approved?

If the answer to all three is no, the strategy is already dead. The good news is that reviving it does not require a new plan. It requires a rhythm.