Your Board is making decisions based on a Version of Reality Your Operations Team No Longer Believes in.

Lujane Brinkman · Technique Works · May 2026

We’ve been in many boardroom meetings. And across Western Europe and the GCC, we keep finding the same thing in different rooms, different industries, different languages.

The board has a strategy. The operations team has a reality. The two have not spoken to each other in years!

Nobody lied. Nobody sabotaged anything. Information was passed through management layers, condensed, softened, and reframed to align with what the presenter believed the board wanted to hear, arriving at the table as a version of the truth that the shop floor team would not recognize.

The strategy built on that version fails. Not because the thinking was wrong. But because the foundation was.

The decisions were sound. The sequence was not.

When execution falls short of expectations, many executives blame their plan. According to Bain & Company, executives report losing 40% of their strategy's potential value to breakdowns in execution. (Mankins, 2017)

The misalignment is rarely visible from the top. As Board Intelligence reported in February 2026, governance appears sound from inside the boardroom. Management follows a process. Risks are noted. Updates are provided. There is no single decision that looks reckless. The problem is not the quality of decisions, it is their sequence. (Board Intelligence, 2026)

The sequence is improper because the inputs are incorrect. And the inputs are incorrect because the signal of what is truly happening on the floor, in the facilities, in the supplier connections, and in the operational reality that the board is supposed to control has been filtered, compressed, and converted into language that the boardroom considers acceptable.

In a 2024–2025 McKinsey survey of 416 senior executives globally, only 21% reported that their strategies passed four or more of the Ten Tests of Strategy, a 40% drop from a decade and a half earlier. (Dye et al., 2025)

That is not a strategy quality problem. It is a diagnostic problem. You cannot build a strategy that holds if the information feeding it has already failed its own accuracy test.

The gap is always there. Most engagements never find it.

We do not begin our engagements with strategy. We begin with verification.

Before making any recommendations, we compare the board's beliefs against what the operations staff knows. In most engagements, the space between the two images represents the actual task rather than the strategic brief we were given.

The operations director knows exactly where the system is fragile. He has known for months, maybe even a couple of years. He has not been able to present it to the board effectively because the board speaks in terms of KPIs, and he speaks in terms of process failures. The translation never happens cleanly. By the time the information reaches the boardroom, it has become a metric. The metric does not carry the weight of what it represents.

According to a poll of more than 500 senior executives conducted by Strategy&, PwC's strategy consulting arm, about 80% said their overall strategy was not widely understood, even within their own organizations. (Leinwand & Mainardi, 2016) That figure points in both directions. The strategy is not obvious. The operational reality does not accurately travel upwards. The communication breakdown is bilateral, and the effects are unbalanced because the board makes the decisions. 

Research from the Corporate Governance Institute, drawing on a 2025 survey of 500 board directors and C-suite executives across the UK and Ireland, found that 86% of respondents admitted their organizations must do more to address governance blind spots. Yet only 22% identified the complex regulatory environment as a top business risk. (The Corporate Governance Institute, 2026)

The confidence exists. The accuracy does not support it.

The deck goes into a drawer—every time.

In our HSEQ work, we distinguish between the policeman and the coach. The policeman catches people doing wrong. The coach catches what is actually happening and builds the conversation that produces lasting change.

The same distinction applies here.

Most strategy engagements are policing exercises. An external team arrives with a framework. They conduct interviews. They built a deck. They present findings in language that mirrors the boardroom's own assumptions, slightly reorganized. The board feels validated. The deck goes into a drawer. A couple of months later, execution has stalled, and nobody can explain why.

When we enter an industrial activity, whether in Rotterdam, Abu Dhabi, or Riyadh, we begin on the floor. We speak with the folks who truly manage the system. We ask the questions that reveal what institutional memory has buried: where the real constraints are, which supplier relationships are truly fragile, which processes are being worked around rather than fixed, and where safety and quality pressures are quietly absorbed because no channel has been created for them to reach the people who can act on them.

That information, properly structured and translated into boardroom language, becomes the foundation of a strategy that holds.

Professor Robert Kaplan's research, the basis of the Balanced Scorecard framework developed with David Norton at Harvard Business School, found that 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully. (Baldridge, 2023) The root cause, consistently, is the same: strategic intent never gets translated into the language and measures that operational teams can actually act on. Translation is the work. Not the framework. Not the deck. The translation.

Closer to strategy is not the same as closer to the truth.

The NACD 2026 Governance Outlook Survey, drawing on responses from 340 directors, found that 62% of boards are increasing strategy discussions in board meetings, and more than 45% are increasing dialogue between board meetings. (van der Oord & Sikora, 2025) Boards are aware they need to be closer to execution. The instinct is right. 

But proximity to strategy discussions is not the same as proximity to operational truth. A board that meets more frequently on strategy but still receives filtered information is making faster decisions on the wrong foundation.

The industrial companies that outperform their peers over the next three years will not be those with the most sophisticated strategic frameworks. They will be the ones where the signal from the floor reaches the boardroom intact and where the response from the boardroom reaches the floor in language that is actually executable.

As per PwC research, companies that close the execution gap are three times more likely to report above-average growth and twice as likely to achieve above-average profits. (Gibson, 2023)

That is not a strategic outcome. That is a communication and translation outcome.

The gap is the engagement.

Across petrochemicals, manufacturing, logistics, and life sciences, we have built diagnostic expertise to identify where the signal is failing, and we have the translation capability to deliver accurate operational intelligence to the rooms where strategy is developed.

We do not arrive with a framework and leave with a deck. We arrive with questions and stay until the answers are in the right hands.

If your board is making strategic choices based on operational assumptions that your operations team is no longer aware of, the gap is in engagement.

Start there. Everything else follows.

Appendix 

[1] Mankins, M. (2017, November). 5 ways the best companies close the strategy-execution gap. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/11/5-ways-the-best-companies-close-the-strategy-execution-gap

[2] Board Intelligence. (2026, February 11). Boards didn't fail in 2025. They waited.https://www.boardintelligence.com/blog/boards-didnt-fail-in-2025.-they-waited

[3] Dye, R., Sibony, O., Viguerie, S. P., & Harnoss, J. (2025, July 14). How strategy champions win: From insight to strategy execution. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-strategy-champions-win

[4] Leinwand, P., & Mainardi, C. (2016, February 3). Creating a strategy that works. Strategy+Business. https://www.strategy-business.com/feature/Creating-a-Strategy-That-Works

[5] The Corporate Governance Institute. (2026). Boardroom resilience in 2026: Independent research into board readiness, risk, and strategy. https://www.thecorporategovernanceinstitute.com/insights/thought-leadership/boardroom-resilience-in-2026/

[6] Baldridge, R. (2023, December 21). 5 reasons strategy execution fails. Harvard Business School Online. https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/why-do-strategic-plans-fail

[7] van der Oord, F., & Sikora, T. (2025, December 10). Boards shift their focus to execution. National Association of Corporate Directors. https://www.nacdonline.org/all-governance/governance-resources/governance-research/outlook-and-challenges/2026-governance-outlook/boards-shift-their-focus-to-execution/

[8] Gibson, K. (2023, December 21). 5 reasons strategy execution fails. Harvard Business School Online. https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/why-do-strategic-plans-fail