The Strategy That Left the Boardroom Isn’t the Strategy That Reaches the Floor
Dr. David Etienne, DBA, CPA, CA
Strategy Drift – It’s Not a Communication Problem. It’s a Translation Problem.
Every leader has felt it: the strategy you announced with total clarity comes back to you three months later, from the front line, as something almost unrecognizable. The instinct is to blame communication — better slides, clearer memos, more town halls. The research says that’s treating the wrong problem.
What’s actually happening has a name in the academic literature: translation loss. And understanding it as a translation problem, not a communication problem, changes what you’d actually do about it.
Middle managers don’t relay strategy. They rebuild it.
The classic model treats a middle manager as a pipe: strategy goes in one end, comes out the other, ideally unchanged. Decades of research say that’s not what happens. Middle managers engage in what researchers call sensemaking — first making sense of the strategy for themselves — before they can do sensegiving — shaping how their own team understands it. That’s two separate acts of interpretation stacked on top of each other, and each one is a place where the original meaning can shift, not just get compressed.
One study that followed middle managers closely as they worked identified this happening in real time, through routines and everyday conversations. The researcher labeled one of the core things middle managers actually do “translating the orientation” — not relaying it. They’re not passing a message along. They’re actively converting it into something that makes sense in their own local context, using their own tacit knowledge of their team and their function. That conversion is where fidelity is won or lost.
The loss isn’t uniform — it fragments
A landmark study followed middle managers through a company-wide restructuring and tracked how their understanding of the change evolved. Managers who started with a shared interpretation of the new strategy didn’t stay aligned — they drifted into what the researchers called “clustered” understanding, and eventually “differentiated” understanding, even though everyone received the same formal announcements. Translation loss isn’t one big signal getting quieter as it travels. It’s the same signal splitting into several different signals, each locally coherent, each drifting further from the others.
Some of the loss is deliberate — and that’s the uncomfortable part
Not all translation loss is innocent. A classic study on strategy implementation found that middle managers whose self-interest is threatened by a new strategy don’t just imperfectly transmit it — they can redirect it, slow it down, water down how it’s executed, or in extreme cases quietly sabotage it entirely. This is worth sitting with: some of what looks like “the strategy got garbled on the way down” is actually a rational, self-protective response from people who correctly understood the strategy and didn’t like what it meant for them.
The scale of this is bigger than most leaders assume
A large-scale study surveying more than 7,600 managers across hundreds of companies found something that should reframe how most executives think about execution failure. The common belief is that execution breaks down because of poor alignment — strategy not being properly cascaded down the hierarchy. The research found the opposite: alignment processes were usually fine. The real failure was coordination across silos — different functions and business units translating the same strategy into locally optimized, mutually inconsistent versions of it, with no mechanism forcing those versions back into agreement.
Don’t over-correct into removing the layer
The obvious wrong conclusion from all this is “cut out the middle layer.” A widely read piece of research pushed back on exactly that instinct: middle managers, studied closely during periods of major change, turn out to generate real entrepreneurial ideas, manage the emotional turbulence of change for their teams, and maintain operational continuity in ways senior leadership structurally cannot. The translation function that causes loss is the same function that makes strategy locally actionable at all. The goal isn’t a lossless pipe. There’s no such thing. The goal is knowing where the loss is happening and why.
Where does your organization’s strategy actually start to drift — at the first management layer below the executive team, or further down, at the point where it crosses between departments?