Value almost never disappears all at once. It leaks. A priority is clear. But nobody’s put their name on it. A decision needs to be made today. But it sits waiting for next month’s meeting. None of this looks terribly alarming. There’s no crisis, the programme’s still green, the monthly report still shows progress. And then one day the organisation adds it all up. And the actual results are a good deal smaller than what everyone anticipated.
I think of this as execution leakage: the value lost between the plan and the outcome, as strategy degrades on its way through the way the firm actually gets things done. Execution leakage is easy to miss. After all, it almost never shows up in just one place. A little goes missing here, a little there, and the total only becomes obvious once someone is finally tasked to put it all together.
The Business Case Is Clearest at the Beginning
Leaders are usually pretty clear about what they want at the start. Cut working capital, improve retention, get a new capability off the ground. It isn’t mysterious. The business case might even have a precise number attached to it.
Ah, but then execution kicks in. The ambition turns into a programme. The programme splits into workstreams. The workstreams turn into ordinary Monday morning meetings, PowerPoints and deliverables. After a while the actual work even reaches the people assigned to actually do it! But by then, the connection to the original point can get pretty thin. By then those tasked to do it know pretty much what they’re expected to deliver. But they’re often a lot less clear on why it matters, either to them, or the customer, or the business.
That’s when leakage happens: when an organisation goes through the motions of assigned activities while losing track of the value the activity was there to produce.
Value Can Be Lost Without Anything Going Obviously Wrong
That’s what makes leakage different from outright failure. Outright failure is big, loud, ugly and obvious. A milestone gets missed, a system doesn’t work, a customer ‘escalates.’ (A nice way of saying, ‘blows up,’ ‘calls his attorney,’ or ‘loses his mind.’)
Leakage is way, way quieter than that. Say a programme is meant to deliver ten million a year. Well, we need to make a design compromise here. That’s tolerable: it only costs a half million. Gosh, a six-month delay ate into the first year’s benefits. So what? It’s only six months. We’re still on target, or mostly on target. Part of the workforce adapts well to the new way of working. The other part, not so much. But a part is a lot! Isn’t it?
None of this is outright disastrous. The project still closes on schedule. Yet somehow the organisation ends up banking six million instead of ten. Four million has somehow gone missing somewhere between the plan and the finish line. Au revoir!
Where the hell is it? What happened? A meeting is held. Everyone points to everyone else. But no one is really held to account. After all, the company banked six million. That’s good, right?
Yes. It is good. Just not good enough.
What happened? That’s not the right question. The right question is, “Where?”
An Observation From Practice
I once sat through an initiative where the business case stayed front and centre at the executive level, and got steadily vaguer the further down the organisation you went, like a ghost fading away. It wasn’t that the project teams didn’t care about value. I was there. Believe me, they cared plenty! They were as focused and professional as they could be. Operations had a readiness plan, Finance had its benefit numbers locked into a spreadsheet, the tech team had a deployment date. As the Americans say, they were ready to rock!
Then… the air just seemed to leak out of things. New planning guidelines were supposed to be adopted immediately, across the board. I remember asking a local operations lead soon after whether the new system was actually changing how her team made decisions day to day. She laughed. “We go live next month, maybe. Ask me again in six.” Fair enough. Six months on, I asked again. The new system was live! But her team was still running the old spreadsheets, “because we’re used to it.”
A system doesn’t create value the day it goes live. It creates value once people actually start using it, and acting differently because of it. And if they’re not using it, and no one is watching, and no one cares, then that difference doesn’t show up, and neither does the value.
Handoffs Are One of the First Places I Look
Leakage loves boundaries. One function finishes its bit, hands it off, and it washes its hands of it. Finished, done! Every time execution crosses a line, its intensity, its momentum, gets a little diluted. Take a simple cost-saving initiative. Procurement finds a cheaper supplier, end of story. The saving is entirely real. Hurray!
But then manufacturing has to deal with a little more variability from the new source. Planning thinks it needs to take a tiny extra step to protect service, so it raises inventory. Logistics then reshuffles its shipping patterns to cope. Invisibly, one domino falls, then the next, then the next.
But the procurement saving genuinely happened. It’s totally visible!
So did every one of the new costs it triggered on the way. But who is there to notice the connection?
If the organisation only ever looks at the original functional win, it ends up celebrating a saving that is in reality a loss. Which is about as classic a case of leakage as they come. A local decision does exactly what it was supposed to do. Locally. End-to-end, the numbers move in a completely opposite way.
Decisions Leak Value Too
Some of the biggest losses happen not because a decision was wrong, but because it came too late. A risk gets flagged, the evidence gets discussed, somebody asks for more analysis, and a full and thorough assessment comes back next month. By which time the firm’s options have severely narrowed. The decision might still be the right one. But its value has shrunk anyway, purely because of when it finally got made.
You see this constantly in operations. Catch a supply problem early and you’ve got several sensible, affordable ways to fix it. Catch it four weeks later and your only options are premium freight, a disrupted schedule or a formal apology to a very disappointed customer. Same catch. Wildly different price tag. It all depends on timing. Which is really one of the key elements of good governance. The point is not speed for speed’s sake, and it’s not slowness for the sake of slowness, either. The point is to meet (ideally to exceed) the customer’s expectations by landing a deliverable at the expected time. To deliver a perceived value that timely delivery alone can ensure.
Workarounds Can Preserve Outcomes, but Hide Leakage
People often ask me why leakages stay invisible for so long. After all, the job does get done. Doesn’t it? Good people step in, expedite the shipment using more personnel than are really needed, build more spreadsheets than perhaps anyone asked for, make more calls than are really necessary, confirm delivery. They succeed. And because they succeed, the organisation records a successful outcome, and never quite notices the extra effort behind it. Hey: the shipment showed up! The metric stayed green! Value still leaked. But not a whole lot. Premium freight, extra hours. A growing dependence on the two or three people who always seem to find workarounds to fix things.
Two separate questions need to be asked. First, and always: Did we hit the outcome? But no less importantly: Did we hit it through the operating model we’re committed to? Because if the answer to the second question is, “No,” then you’re not really hitting an outcome. You’re rescuing it. You’re taking unnecessary steps that shouldn’t be needed to achieve something that shouldn’t need them in the first place.
A system that leans that hard on rescue can still produce perfectly decent short-term results. But long-term, it will eat up the very value it was intended to create.
Complexity Creates More Places for Value to Escape
Achieving operational excellence can be a bit of a gauntlet. The more moving parts an organisation has (functions, sites, suppliers, governance forums, etcetera, etcetera), the more places value has to battle through to survive intact. Complexity per se is not a problem; big businesses genuinely need structure.
But every interface is one more small crossing point where things can most easily go missing. Like runners passing a baton, both may be Olympians as they run, but if the baton is dropped, the race is lost. That’s why it matters to give attention to precisely such vulnerable points, to be clear about who owns the outcome, about how decisions actually get made, about where the exceptions get flagged. Skip that clarity, and the gravity of complexity will slowly pull activity and value apart. Even while the strategy paperwork sitting on the shelf looks the same as it did the day it was written.
Benefits Tracking Is Necessary. But It’s Not Enough
Strengthening benefits management is sensible enough. After all, benefits need real owners, real baselines, real evidence. But, by its nature, tracking benefits is a matter of looking backwards. It tells you whether the value showed up. That’s worth knowing, to be sure. But what you actually need to know is whether value is currently at risk of leaking. To know that early enough to still do something about it. Has the scope of the project imperceptibly shifted over time? Has a design choice trimmed the expected benefit significantly without anyone updating the number? These aren’t finance questions wearing a business hat. They’re execution questions, plain and simple. Questions worth asking well before the benefit fails to turn up.
Strategy Can Leak Through Measures
Performance measures deserve a close look here too. If a transformation needs cross-functional cooperation, but everyone’s still being measured almost entirely on their own function’s numbers, leakage isn’t a risk: it’s practically a certainty. The fact is, business functions protect their own turf. Manufacturing protects efficiency, Supply Chain protects inventory, Sales protects revenue. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Every one of those measures makes perfect sense on its own terms.
The trouble starts the moment the enterprise outcome needs a trade-off between them, and nothing in the governance actually addresses that trade-off specifically and out loud.
New strategies arrive with the best of intentions. Old operating models persist, because often they’ve become matters of ingrained habit. The old models entertain the new strategies, adopt them superficially for a while, even absorb a few compatible elements; then sink back into the same old same old, somewhat improved, maybe, but only somewhat. What else would you expect, if the old measures are never really held up to scrutiny? So the organisation ends up puzzled about why transformation is so much slower than the strategy deck promised.
A Question Worth Asking
When I look at an important initiative, I ask whether it could deliver every single thing it promised, and yet still fail to create the value someone actually wanted. That’s a different question from asking where the project might fail outright. Maybe the solution launches fine, even without real adoption. Maybe the old workaround just keeps running alongside the new process without causing any real harm, for now. I’d ask if there were any evidence that leakage was already starting. Because now we’re watching value integrity, not just progress against a plan.
The Value Chain of Execution
Every serious initiative should be able to walk through a simple chain: strategic intent, the capability it needs, the execution changes required, real adoption, a genuine shift in performance, and finally the business benefit.
Weaken any one link and value can slip straight through the gap.
A strategy without the right capability? That’s just dreaming. Capability without proper execution design? That’s a good idea that stays just an idea. Adoption with only minimal changes in performance? That’s just busy, well-documented, measurable activity that adds no value and goes nowhere in particular. The chain itself is easy enough to draw on a whiteboard. But name each link out loud, and examine it, and you change the whole quality of the conversation.
Executive Reflection
When I hear a transformation is “going well,” I want to know a good deal more than that overall judgement. Is the original value case still intact? Or has it been trimmed down somewhere that nobody put into the minutes? Are the benefits actually moving in step with delivery? Or always promised for next quarter? And the big, uncomfortable one, the one I always save for last: what value are we losing right now that no one owns, and that isn’t yet anyone’s official problem?
That question rarely gets a comfortable answer. It’s exactly the point where a leader needs to step in, and can still step in. The moment when the leak is small enough to fix.
Reliable Execution Protects Value
Execution discipline is not about making projects feel more controlled. It’s about protecting the value the strategy is intended to create in the first place. That takes something more than good project management. It takes a genuine line of sight running from strategic priority all the way through to the results people actually feel. It takes a commitment to make sure that nothing is lost along the way.
When that line of sight holds, leadership can literally see how value moves, and see where that value is moving. When they can’t, usually activity becomes the loudest signal in the room. Or rather the loudest noise, for activity, frankly, can be a bit of a liar. A busy organisation isn’t necessarily one that is executing its strategy well, or even at all. A completed programme isn’t necessarily one that created any value.
A green dashboard is not enough.
Continue the Conversation
The next time a major initiative launches, don’t just ask, What will this programme deliver? Ask instead where, between the vaulting ambition and the potentially far humbler end result, value could slip away. Ask how you could spot it. Ask how you’d actually know early enough to do something about it.
Because strategy rarely loses its value in one dramatic moment. It bleeds away, drop by drop. It loses a little through a delayed decision, a little through a handoff, a little through a workaround nobody flagged, a little through a benefit that technically belongs to everyone and in practice belongs to no one.
One day the organisation lines up what it actually got against what it originally set out to achieve. The gap is a yawning chasm.
Everyone wonders why the two have drifted so far apart. By now you should know. Execution leakage. Learning to spot it while there’s still time is one of the most useful, profitable, obvious disciplines in reliable execution.
Or perhaps I should say: obvious to those business leaders who are conscientious enough to have read about it, Dear Reader. Like you.
James Amoah
Executive Observation #010
Reliable Execution
Executive Observations are practical reflections from more than twenty-five years of leading and supporting operational, supply chain and business improvement. They explore the connections between reliable execution, leadership, operational excellence and customer experience — and what those connections mean for those endeavouring to make their businesses better, stronger, more profitable leaders in their field.
