You’ve seen this movie before.
The leadership team spends a week offsite. They come back with a new strategic plan. It’s smart. It’s ambitious. Everyone’s excited.
Six months later, frontline operations look exactly the same.
Harvard Business Review puts a number on it: 67% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution. Not bad strategy. Bad implementation.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: your OKR software isn’t fixing this. It might actually be making it worse.
The Great Strategy Execution Disconnect
The strategy execution software market is booming — projected to reach $6.8 billion by 2033, growing at 12.3% annually. With Microsoft Viva Goals retiring in December 2025 and WorkBoard acquiring Quantive in May 2025, enterprise leaders are actively shopping for new solutions.
But most of them are shopping for the wrong thing.
Here’s what the market offers:
Strategy Planning Tools (Cascade, ITONICS): Help you define and visualize strategy. Roadmaps, portfolio views, scenario planning.
OKR & Goal Tracking (WorkBoard/Quantive, Betterworks, Teamflect): Help you set objectives, track key results, run check-ins.
Performance Management (Lattice, 15Five, Culture Amp): Help you review employee performance against goals.
All useful. None of them answer the fundamental question:
“How do we make strategic priorities show up in what people actually do every day?”
The Layer Nobody Built
Think about how strategy gets “executed” today:
- Leadership defines strategic priority
- Communication cascades down the org
- Training programs roll out
- OKR software tracks progress
- Quarterly reviews check alignment
Notice what’s missing? There’s no mechanism between step 3 (training) and step 4 (tracking) that changes daily behavior.
The assumption is that if you communicate clearly enough, train thoroughly enough, and track diligently enough, behavior will change.
It won’t. Research consistently shows that training alone changes behavior in less than 20% of cases. Communication creates awareness, not action.
What’s missing is systematic behavior implementation — technology that operates at the daily workflow level, reinforcing new behaviors until they become the default way of working.
What Behavior Implementation Actually Looks Like
Instead of tracking whether teams are “aligned” to a strategic priority, behavior implementation asks:
- What specific actions need to change? Not “improve customer centricity” — what do people need to do differently in their daily workflow?
- Are those actions happening? Not in a quarterly review — today, this week, in real time.
- What’s reinforcing the old behavior? Systems, habits, and processes that make the old way easier than the new way.
- How do we make the new behavior stick? Through consistent, technology-driven reinforcement — not training, not reminders, not dashboards.
This is fundamentally different from goal tracking. Goal tracking tells you whether you’re on track. Behavior implementation tells you why you’re on or off track — and actively closes the gap.
The 82% Problem
Here’s a statistic that should stop every CEO in their tracks:
82% of executives believe their organization is aligned with strategy. Only 23% of the workforce agrees.
That’s not a communication problem. It’s an implementation problem. Leadership thinks the strategy has cascaded because it shows up in OKR dashboards and town hall slides. The workforce knows it hasn’t because their daily work hasn’t changed.
Closing that 59-point gap requires more than better goal software. It requires technology that operates at the behavior level — where strategy either becomes real or dies.
What Enterprise Leaders Should Ask Before Buying
Before choosing your next strategy execution platform, ask these questions:
- Does this tool change what people do, or just track what they report?
- Does it operate daily, or quarterly?
- *Can it identify why a strategic initiative isn’t sticking, not just that it isn’t?*
- Does it reduce the gap between executive intent and frontline reality?
- Can you measure behavior change within 30 days, not 12 months?
If your current shortlist only includes OKR and goal-tracking tools, you’re solving half the problem.
The Path Forward
The strategy execution market is consolidating around AI-powered platforms — WorkBoardAI’s “digital workers,” Cascade’s strategic dashboards, Betterworks’ performance alignment.
But consolidation at the top doesn’t solve the problem at the bottom. The gap between “strategy defined” and “strategy implemented” persists because no amount of better tracking changes what happens at the daily operational level.
The organizations that will win in 2026 aren’t the ones with the best strategy dashboards. They’re the ones that cracked the behavior implementation problem.
Strategy execution isn’t a tracking problem. It’s an implementation problem.
GWork is strategic implementation technology — the layer between strategy definition and daily operations. We help organizations turn strategic priorities into consistent daily behaviors. Learn about our 90-day pilot →
About the Author: Oran Cohen is the founder of GWork, strategic implementation technology for enterprises. He’s spent 8 years studying why organizational strategy fails to translate into daily operations — and building the technology to fix it.
Keywords: strategy execution software, OKR alternative, Viva Goals replacement, strategy implementation, strategy-execution gap, behavior change technology, organizational effectiveness, strategic planning software 2026
