Before You Build the 2027 Plan: Fix These 6 Execution Gaps

As leadership teams begin planning for 2027, much of the attention will naturally turn toward budgets, targets, strategic priorities and new initiatives.

Before adding more to the plan, though, I think there is value in looking closely at the plan we already had.

What worked? What did not? What should we repeat? What should we stop doing? And perhaps most importantly, what did the last year teach us about how well our organization actually executes?

In my experience, organizations do not usually struggle because they lack goals. More often, the challenge is what happens between establishing those goals and delivering the results.

Here are six execution gaps worth examining before finalizing the next plan.

1. The Strategy to Execution Gap

One of the most overlooked parts of planning for the future is taking enough time to understand the past.

Organizations naturally spend significant energy investigating poor performance. When an important result misses its target, leaders want to know what went wrong. But when the same measure significantly outperforms expectations, the examination is often far less rigorous. The result is celebrated, and everyone moves on.

That is a missed opportunity.

A positive performance gap can be just as valuable as a negative one. If customer satisfaction improves, productivity exceeds expectations or a team consistently delivers above plan, leaders should ask why. Was the result driven by a process change, staffing decision, leadership action, technology investment or different operating practice? Was it repeatable, or did temporary external conditions contribute?

The same discipline should apply when performance falls short, without immediately assuming the owner is at fault. A stronger review asks whether the right person was selected to own the work, whether that person had the experience, authority, resources and support required, and whether circumstances outside the owner's control materially affected the result.

This is why leadership teams should look back far enough—often twelve to sixteen months—to identify patterns rather than isolated events. The actions that influence a result may occur months before the result becomes visible.

Teams should also avoid confusing correlation with causation. If performance improved after a particular change, leaders should examine whether that change actually drove the outcome or whether other factors were at work.

The objective is not simply to explain historical numbers. It is to understand the relationship between strategy, execution and results well enough to make better decisions going forward.

Before asking, “What should we do differently in 2027?”

A better first question may be:

“What did the last 12 to 16 months teach us about what actually drives our results?”

2. The Ownership Gap

Once the right outcomes and activities have been identified, we need to look carefully at ownership.

Assigning someone's name to an objective does not necessarily mean we selected the right owner.

Too often, ownership is determined by title, organizational structure or who happens to be available. Then, when the result misses the target, we immediately look toward that person for an explanation.

Accountability matters, but we should first determine whether the owner was positioned to succeed.

Did the person have the appropriate experience and expertise?

Did they have enough authority to make the decisions necessary to affect the result?

Did they have access to the right information and resources?

Were important dependencies outside of their control?

And did the owner truly have enough influence over the outcome to reasonably be held accountable for it?

Former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson has written extensively about matching the right talent to the work that needs to be accomplished and then building the management systems around people that allow them to perform.

I think that is an important leadership responsibility.

We should absolutely hold owners accountable. But leadership should also be accountable for selecting the right owner and creating the conditions that allow that person to succeed.

There is also a difference between ownership and participation.

Twenty people may contribute to an initiative.

That does not mean twenty people own it.

Clear execution usually requires one person who understands the result, watches the underlying drivers and knows when action needs to be taken.

3. The Measurement Gap

Most organizations do not suffer from a lack of metrics.

In many cases, they have too many.

The challenge is determining whether the measures being reviewed actually help leaders manage the business or simply report what has already happened.

Revenue, customer satisfaction, operating expense, productivity, profitability and project completion are all important outcomes. But they are generally lagging indicators. By the time a meaningful change appears in the result, the activities that caused it may have occurred weeks or months earlier.

That is why leadership teams need to identify the leading indicators underneath their most important outcomes.

If customer experience is the result, what activities are likely to influence it before the survey score changes?

If productivity is the outcome, what measures around workload, staffing, scheduling, cycle time, quality or rework provide an earlier indication of where productivity is headed?

If project completion is the goal, what milestones, dependencies or execution measures tell leadership today whether the organization is likely to deliver three months from now?

The goal is not to add more measures.

It is to identify the few measures that provide the clearest line of sight between today's activity and tomorrow's result.

Leadership teams should also examine whether every metric still serves a purpose. Measures have a tendency to accumulate over time. A dashboard that started with ten meaningful indicators can easily become a collection of thirty or forty numbers, all competing for attention.

A strong measurement system should help leaders answer two questions quickly:

Where are we now?

And:

Where are we likely to be if nothing changes?

The best measures should help leaders manage the future, not simply explain the past.

4. The Operating Rhythm Gap

A strong execution process requires the right management cadence.

And more meetings are not necessarily the answer.

Some organizations meet too infrequently. Performance is reviewed quarterly, issues accumulate between governance sessions and by the time a significant problem is discussed, weeks or months of opportunity have already been lost.

Other organizations create the opposite problem.

They meet weekly, or sometimes even more frequently on matters that do not require that level of attention. Leaders and employees spend significant time preparing presentations, attending governance sessions and reporting information rather than doing the work necessary to improve the result.

The question is not simply, “How often should we meet?”

The better question is:

“How frequently does this particular result need management attention?”

Different measures may require different rhythms.

Some execution drivers may warrant weekly attention because conditions change quickly and early intervention matters.

Other measures may be better suited to monthly review because week-to-week movement provides little meaningful insight.

Longer-term strategic outcomes may only require deeper quarterly examination.

The operating rhythm should also be designed around decisions rather than presentations.

A productive governance session should answer:

What changed?

What is moving off plan?

Why?

What action is required?

Who owns the action?

And when will we revisit it?

If meetings primarily consist of reading information that participants could have reviewed beforehand, the cadence may be consuming organizational capacity rather than improving execution.

The objective is to create enough governance to surface issues early, but not so much governance that the process itself becomes an obstacle to getting the work done.

5. The Organizational Alignment Gap

Another execution problem can occur when we have too many people managing the work and too few people actually doing it.

An initiative may have an executive sponsor, several functional leaders, project managers, governance teams and steering committees.

Yet the actual execution team may still be stretched thin.

Leadership teams should periodically look at the structure around important work and ask a simple question:

Do we have the right balance of leaders and doers?

There are people who need to know what is happening.

There are people who need to make decisions.

And there are people who need to actually perform the work.

Those are not always the same people.

Simon Sinek's work around trusting teams also offers an important reminder here. Strong teams need enough trust and clarity for the people closest to the work to raise problems, question assumptions and ask for help.

The people closest to execution often see problems before anyone else.

Leadership should create enough structure to provide direction and remove barriers without creating so many layers that information becomes diluted as it moves upward.

Alignment is not simply making sure everyone has seen the strategy presentation.

It is making sure the organization understands who decides, who executes, who needs visibility and how all of those roles connect to the desired result.

6. The Intervention Gap

Identifying that a result is off track is only the beginning.

The real test of an execution system is what happens next.

Organizations sometimes recognize poor performance but lack a consistent method for determining when leadership intervention is necessary, what type of intervention is appropriate and who should take action.

Every miss does not require an executive response.

Some variations are temporary. Some can be corrected by the owner and team. Others indicate a more significant problem that requires additional resources, cross-functional support or a change in direction.

Leadership teams need to understand the difference.

When a result moves off plan, the first response should not automatically be to escalate the issue or replace the owner. Leaders should determine what is actually driving the variance.

Is an execution driver underperforming?

Was an assumption in the original plan incorrect?

Has an external condition changed?

Does the owner lack resources or authority?

Is another function creating a dependency that cannot be resolved at the current level?

Or is the organization executing exactly as planned, but the plan itself is no longer producing the expected outcome?

The quality of the intervention depends on the quality of the diagnosis.

Organizations also need clear thresholds for action. If everyone has a different interpretation of when something has become a problem, intervention will often depend more on personalities than on disciplined management.

Strong execution systems create visibility early enough for leaders to act while there are still meaningful options available.

The purpose of governance is not simply to identify red or green metrics.

It is to help leaders recognize when something requires attention, understand why, and make the right intervention before a manageable issue becomes a missed objective.

Before Adding More to the 2027 Plan

Planning for a new year naturally creates momentum toward new objectives, new initiatives and new targets.

But sometimes the most valuable improvement is not adding something new.

It is fixing the execution system that already exists.

Before finalizing the 2027 plan, leadership teams should examine whether they truly understand what drove past performance, whether accountability sits with the right people, whether the right things are being measured, whether governance occurs at the right frequency, whether the organization has enough execution capacity and whether leaders know when and how to intervene.

The objective is not to build a perfect management process. It is to create a clearer connection between strategy, people, execution and results.

Organizations rarely suffer from a shortage of goals. The real opportunity is becoming more disciplined about turning those goals into results.