We wanted to understand why strategies, programs, and major changes so often fall short - and how to improve their chances of success.
We found that many of the most serious implementation problems begin before implementation starts, as goals and actions are being designed, and remain largely hidden until implementation.
Most consequential situations require a response that does not yet exist.
A decision is a choice among options. That definition is deeply rooted in academic thinking, management education, and everyday practice. When workable options exist, compare them and choose the best one.
But most strategic challenges, transformations, crises, growth opportunities, and complex organizational problems do not come with ready-to-use options.
This is the null case in decision-making: a response is needed, but no valid options yet exist. The group must design the goals and actions that will become its response.
The best proposal considered may still fall short of the best response possible.
The deep-rooted choice mindset causes most groups to generate several ideas, compare them, and develop the one they judge to be best.
Choosing one proposal shows only that it appears better than the others considered. It does not show that any of those proposals contains the strongest response the group could achieve - or that refining the chosen proposal will produce it.
Each idea reflects only some of the relevant factors. Improving it may make it stronger, while leaving consequential omissions and weaknesses undiscovered.
Our research indicates that this approach causes most groups to produce suboptimal goals and actions: responses that look rational, logical, and compelling while being incomplete or poorly matched to the situation.
False positives. Paper tigers.
The best option approved is not necessarily the best possible response available.
The response must account for the situation’s full reality.
The best possible response lies within the situation itself.
It must account for the underlying causes, desired outcomes, constraints, stakeholders, dependencies, competing and reinforcing motivations, timing, resources, implementation needs, risks, uncertainties, and opportunities. Together, these factors create a very large range of possible solutions.
We proposed a different approach: design the set of goals and actions that best accounts for all the relevant factors.
That response should offer the strongest attainable combination of three essential characteristics.
Fit
The right goals for the situation.
Feasibility
A practical path to achieve them.
Alignment
Enough stakeholder support to move forward.
Conventional methods and concepts do not enable groups to optimize this combination.
Capable groups lose design quality before the first conversation.
Although every situation and group is different, and no two groups follow the same path when designing goals and actions, we found a common underlying process.
Studying it revealed:
recurring quality leaks
occur before the group’s first conversation
In most situations, the optimal design is already outside the group’s field of consideration when conversation starts.
These quality leaks stem from century-old methods that were not intended for this work, missing methods, invalid concepts, and flawed assumptions.
They lead smart, capable groups to create convincing responses that are inaccurate, incomplete, or impractical. Those flaws are then carried into implementation.
Implications for Strategy
Strategy does not lead straight into execution.
When the leadership team approves a revised business strategy, the groups below it do not simply take that strategy and implement it. Their first task is to understand the new direction, review their existing strategies, and co-design the revisions required to support it.
Marketing, sales, HR, IT, and other departments must determine what to retain, change, stop, or introduce. Their revised strategies then trigger further reviews and revisions within their functions. Each design must support the strategy above it and accommodate the other groups on which it depends.
One business strategy revision can trigger revisions to more than 70 sub-strategies, nested three or four tiers into the organization, over the following weeks and months. These lead to further group designs of policies, processes, IT projects, outsourcing arrangements, joint ventures, and industry alliances.
The leadership team’s strategy is the beginning of an expanding portfolio of interdependent designs through which its intent becomes action.
Each group designs within the agreed direction, reconciles dependencies, and surfaces constraints that affect the wider strategy. Design and execution can overlap across branches.
Domain expertise does not provide strategy design expertise.
At each point in the hierarchy, a senior leader convenes a group to design the required changes. The participants bring expertise in their markets, customers, people, technologies, and operations.
That expertise does not itself equip them to guide a group through strategy revision. Turning distributed knowledge, differing views, constraints, and commitments into the strongest attainable goals and actions requires a further capability.
Responsibility for a departmental strategy does not establish that its leader has been equipped to guide its design. Yet the organization repeatedly depends on that capability as its strategy moves through the hierarchy.
Design weaknesses accumulate between strategy and execution.
Each group can inherit weaknesses from the strategy above it and introduce further weaknesses into its own design. An assumption can change meaning. An intended outcome can disappear. A necessary action can remain unidentified. A dependency can be presumed rather than reconciled.
The 41 quality leaks therefore have significance far beyond the leadership team’s strategy meeting. They recur throughout the cascade, weakening both individual strategies and the coherence of the whole.
Each resulting strategy may appear rational, logical, and consistent with the direction provided. Collectively, their omissions and incompatibilities can lead the organization toward a result the leadership team never intended.
The leadership team may see the dilution only after resources are committed.
Completed plans and reassuring progress reports do not establish the quality of the designs being implemented. Their weaknesses can remain hidden until they appear as incompatible actions, delays, rework, and missed outcomes.
Some of these problems originate in execution. Others originated in the preceding strategy revisions. Treating both as execution problems directs attention toward communication, accountability, and delivery while leaving the underlying design weaknesses unresolved.
The CSO and leadership team are then drawn into repeated explanations, escalations, and repairs. Intent that appeared to have been understood and accepted has become diluted through successive designs.
The corrective response is commonly another group design. If the same flawed concepts and methods are used, the correction can introduce further weaknesses.
Flaws in business and sub-strategy designs
Implementation difficulties
Corrective null case designs
Further flaws if the design weaknesses persist
Null Case Decision Design must be a core strategy capability.
The CSO cannot be the strategy design expert in every room. The capability must therefore be available wherever groups are revising the strategies through which the business strategy will take effect.
The null case findings create two connected responsibilities for the CSO.
Help the leadership team co-design a stronger business strategy.
Use the research insights to address the quality leaks in the leadership team’s own design process. The starting strategy should achieve the strongest attainable combination of Fit, Feasibility, and Alignment: Best Possible, rather than simply the best proposal the team considered.
Make the same capability available throughout the cascade.
Equip departmental and functional groups with a common discipline for designing their supporting strategies. It must work across marketing, sales, HR, IT, and other domains, allowing each group to apply its expertise while meeting a shared standard of design quality.
That capability also gives the CSO a basis for assessing supporting designs before commitment, without having personally guided every conversation.
Strategic intent and the capability to design its supporting responses must cascade together. This addresses the repeated sources of quality loss between strategy and execution, making weaknesses visible while they can still be resolved in design.
SchellingPoint makes that capability practical.
Our research revealed there has never been a universal, publicly available approach to the null case decision. So we used the research insights to develop one.
It provides a common vocabulary, framework, methods, and measures that leaders and managers can learn and apply wherever groups need to co-design a shared response.
Because people can overlook steps, apply methods inconsistently, or face limits in what they can process, we built safeguards against the 41 identified quality leaks into software and AI.
Combined with null case optimization logic, these tools help groups directly identify the best possible goals and actions within a situation’s full solution space. No options needed.
The framework and software make null case decision design a capability that organizations can own and use repeatedly throughout the strategy cascade and its subsequent revisions.
Or any situation where a leader or manager needs to take action and pre-defined options are unavailable.
Leaders and managers need to be decision designers as well as decision makers.
SchellingPoint’s work combines more than a decade of teaching managerial decision-making at leading business schools with research into how groups develop goals and actions - and how flaws in those designs undermine implementation.
That work exposed a significant blind spot in managerial decision-making. Leaders and managers are taught to evaluate options and make choices. Yet designing a strategy, transformation, program, or project requires creating a response where no valid options exist - the null case decision. Organizations depend on this work, but lack a common discipline for performing it, assessing its quality, and improving it.
Our research examines that missing capability: the process groups follow, where design quality is lost, and what enables them to produce the strongest attainable combination of fit, feasibility, and alignment. We have translated the findings into a framework, methods, measures, software, and AI that make optimal null case decision design a practical capability organizations can develop and own.
Explore how the research led to these insights, what they mean for your organization, and the solutions available to put them into practice.
