How Reasonable Decisions Become Strategic Drift

Some of the most challenging organizational problems I’ve encountered emerged while capable people were making reasonable decisions. One team protected a delivery date, another adapted to an operational constraint, and a third accommodated a stakeholder whose support was necessary. Each was responding to something real. The difficulty was seeing what those choices produced together.

A workaround introduced to keep delivery moving became part of the permanent process. A temporary exception changed what another team had to accommodate. Milestones were still being achieved, but the combined effect moved the organization away from the direction its leaders believed they had established.

Russell Ackoff argued that making each part of a system perform as well as possible does not necessarily improve the performance of the whole. What matters is how those parts interact. That approach shifts the question from whether each team made a defensible decision to what those decisions produced together.

That is also why I am cautious about describing strategic drift as poor execution. Teams may be delivering exactly what their measures, incentives and commitments ask of them. Ackoff was particularly critical of performance measures that optimize parts while bringing them into conflict with one another. If reporting follows only those same boundaries, each area can demonstrate progress without revealing the compromises others are making to sustain it.

I don’t think the answer is to bring every local decision back to an executive. People need room to respond to circumstances leadership cannot see in full. But they also need to understand the reasoning behind the direction and have a way to surface when their choices create difficulties elsewhere.

Nor should we assume every departure from the original plan is a failure. Local adaptations may reveal a better direction. What matters is whether leaders recognize the change and examine what it means, rather than allowing a succession of exceptions to become a strategy nobody consciously chose.

Asking whether a team delivered remains important. I would also ask what its delivery made easier or harder for the rest of the organization. The answer may tell us whether we have improved the whole or simply moved the difficulty somewhere less visible.