The Strategy-Market Gap
Why Most Strategies Fail Before Execution Even Begins
Published
February 8, 2025
What Is the Strategy-Market Gap?
The strategy-market gap emerges when there’s a lag between strategic planning and real-world conditions. Most organizations follow a familiar pattern:
Plan: Leaders analyze data, assess the market, and build a strategy based on current assumptions.
Cascade: The strategy is communicated throughout the organization, with goals and KPIs assigned.
Execute: Teams implement the plan, assuming the strategy is still relevant.
Measure: By the time results are evaluated, the market and operating environment has already shifted.
This approach assumes stability — but today’s markets and operating environments are anything but stable. The longer the lag between planning and execution, the wider the strategy-market gap becomes. Organizations end up executing yesterday’s strategy in today’s world.
Why This Gap Exists
It's important to recognize that the strategy-market gap isn’t anyone’s fault — this is simply how business has operated for decades. Organizations have experimented with alternatives to sequential planning — emergent strategies, agile frameworks, real-time analytics — but none have fully solved the challenge of keeping strategy and execution continuously aligned at scale. How else could strategy and execution have stayed aligned in real time? One option might have been to employ an army of market analysts, feeding continuous insights into every function of the enterprise, ensuring constant recalibration. But that’s never been feasible — though some industries, like finance, have attempted versions of this with rapid-response trading models and real-time risk assessment.
Yet, what we’re talking about here extends far beyond financial markets. The broader operating environment includes regulatory changes, geopolitical shifts, supply chain disruptions, natural disasters, etc. — all factors that impact every organization, not just those in high-frequency trading.
These conditions have always existed. What hasn’t existed is a way to systematically align strategy and execution without massive inefficiencies or impractical manual oversight.
That’s why the strategy-market gap has persisted — it hasn’t been a failure of leadership, effort, or even technology. It’s been a structural limitation.
Until now, there has been no modernized approach that makes continuous alignment achievable at scale. The missing piece is an upgraded operating model — one that brings together a new way of thinking, new capabilities, and a fundamentally different approach to strategy and execution. And that’s where Adaptive Strategies come in.
The strategy-market gap isn’t a theoretical issue — it’s a practical problem that stems from outdated ways of working:
Static Planning Cycles: Traditional planning assumes a level of predictability that no longer exists.
Siloed Decision-Making: Strategy is often developed at the top, while execution happens at the front lines, with little real-time feedback between them.
Lack of Situational Awareness: By the time leadership realizes the market has changed, the company is already misaligned.
Organizations that don’t address these issues risk falling into the trap of executing with precision — but against the wrong objectives.
Closing the Strategy-Market Gap with Adaptive Strategies
The Way Forward
