Harvard Business Review published something in January 2026 that I wish I’d written myself.
They laid out a four-step model for changing workplace behavior, and their core argument was blunt: most organizations try to change behavior through education, communication campaigns, and training – and it almost never translates into measurable shifts in how people actually work.
I’ve spent 20 years walking into organizations where the strategy was solid and the execution was broken. That HBR sentence describes virtually every failed transformation I’ve seen.
How Strategy Dies in Practice
I’ve watched this pattern play out more times than I can count – at banks, logistics companies, tech firms, professional services organizations.
The CEO announces a new strategic priority. It’s usually good. Sometimes genuinely brilliant. The leadership team nods. There’s a town hall. Maybe a workshop. Maybe a new set of values gets printed on the wall.
Then everyone goes back to their desks. Slack. Email. Back-to-back meetings. They do exactly what they did yesterday. Not out of laziness or apathy, but because nobody ever translated that strategy into specific things they should do differently on a Tuesday afternoon.
I worked with a financial services firm a few years ago – clear strategy, talented people, good intentions across the board. One of the project leads kept missing the mark. I assumed it was accountability. Maybe motivation. Maybe she wasn’t up to the role.
Then she asked me a question that changed how I think about execution: “When you say good, what does good actually look like?”
I’d explained the task. The outcome. Why it mattered. What I’d never done was make the expected behavior specific enough to actually act on. When we fixed that, execution shifted within weeks. Nobody tried harder. They just finally knew what to do.
The Numbers Are Damning
67% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution (Forbes, Nov 2025). Three out of five companies rate themselves as weak on execution (HBR, 2022). Global employee engagement has dropped to 21% – the lowest in a decade (Gallup, 2025). Disengaged employees cost the global economy $8.9 trillion in lost productivity (Gallup, 2024).
What most leaders don’t see is that these are the same problem. Strategy failure and disengagement have the same root cause: a gap between what gets decided at the top and what people actually do day to day.
Training Doesn’t Fix This. Neither Does Communication.
The default playbook is “inform and inspire” – education campaigns, training programs, communication cascades. The thinking goes: if people understand the change and have the skills, they’ll change. It makes sense on paper.
Behavioral science figured out decades ago that it doesn’t work that way.
BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model says behavior requires three things at the same moment: motivation, ability, and a prompt. Most organizations pour resources into motivation (town halls, vision statements) and ability (training, workshops). They almost completely ignore the prompt – the trigger at the actual moment of decision.
This is why a two-day leadership offsite produces nothing lasting. People leave motivated and capable. Monday morning arrives, and there’s no prompt. No nudge. No reinforcement. The old way of doing things wins because it takes zero effort.
A 2025 study found that people trained using the Fogg model were 2.65x more likely to adopt new practices than those who received traditional training alone. The difference was timely prompts embedded into their actual workflow.
There’s a Hole in Your Tech Stack
Most organizations have planning tools (OKRs, strategy platforms) to define what needs to happen. They have performance tools (reviews, surveys, analytics) to measure what already happened. But there’s nothing in between.
Nothing that takes a strategic priority and turns it into a specific daily behavior. Nothing that reinforces that behavior when it matters. Nothing that tracks whether it’s becoming a habit or just another forgotten initiative.
Think of it this way: you have a GPS showing the destination and a dashboard showing how much fuel you burned. But nobody gave you a steering wheel.
Gallup’s own research found that “even brief, consistent conversations that reinforce purpose show measurable impact.” Brief. Consistent. In the flow of work. That’s not a training program. That’s something fundamentally different.
What I’ve Seen Work (and What Hasn’t)
After two decades of watching transformation efforts land or crash, the ones that stick tend to get three things right:
Get specific about the behavior
“Improve communication” means nothing. “Every Monday, team leads share their top three priorities in a two-minute standup” means everything. One is a slogan. The other is something a person can actually do tomorrow morning.
The HBR piece recommends targeting a single high-impact behavior. I’ve seen organizations try to change fifteen things simultaneously. They change nothing. The ones that pick one behavior and get it right build momentum that carries into the next change.
Show up where work happens
If the desired behavior doesn’t appear where people already spend their time – in Slack, in their calendar, in their inbox – it might as well not exist. A poster in the kitchen isn’t reinforcement. A quarterly review isn’t reinforcement. A nudge that shows up in your workflow right when you need to make a decision – that’s reinforcement.
Measure the behavior, not just the outcome
Revenue, retention, customer satisfaction – these are lagging indicators. By the time they dip, the underlying behavioral problems have been compounding for months. The leading indicators matter more: is the team actually doing the thing? How consistently? What’s the adoption rate this week compared to last?
You Don’t Have to Be Part of the 67%
Strategy failure is a design problem, not an inevitability. The research keeps pointing in the same direction: stop trying to change behavior through information alone and start building systems that reinforce the right behaviors at the right time.
The strategies that fail? They fail in the space between the boardroom and the daily work. Closing that gap doesn’t require bigger training budgets or louder town halls. It requires getting specific about behavior, reinforcing it consistently, and meeting people where they already work.
Oran Cohen is the founder of GWork, which turns strategic priorities into daily behavioral habits reinforced through Slack, Outlook, and calendars. He has spent 20+ years helping enterprises close the gap between strategy and execution.
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