Strategy execution failure rarely looks like failure while it is happening. Most Founders can easily tell everything their business started this year, while very few can say why it actually finished somewhere else. The gap between those two lists is where margin, speed and management attention is lost.
When execution unravels, we reach for one of two explanations. Either the strategy was wrong, or the people did not deliver. Both diagnoses are usually wrong, and both are expensive, because they send you looking for a new plan or a new team when neither is the problem. What has actually happened is an accumulation. The business opened up far too many issues than it closed, and it’s hard to find somebody collectively accountable for it.
So, what is an Incomplete Circle ?
An Incomplete Circle is anything we deliberately began but never closed: a project, a conversation, a commitment made in a review meeting, an instruction issued and never followed through. Intent begins as a dot, action moves it along an arc, and closure completes the circle. When the arc stops looping back, the energy you invested does not come back. It stays out there, still drawing on the business.
Look honestly at any operating company and most of what it contains remains unfinished. There is the strategy refresh that reached the slide stage, and the ERP rollout lives in only two functions out of five. Somewhere sits an appraisal conversation someone rescheduled, and a supplier renegotiation that reached a first draft. None of these count as failures in the dramatic sense; each simply stopped moving.
Individually they might look as harmless Work-in-progress (WIP), and that is exactly the problem. Over time the smaller open circles coalesce. A stalled costing review, an unresolved quality issue and an unclear reporting line eventually merge into something large enough to demand a crisis response. Big problems are rarely born big. They assemble themselves quietly out of small ones nobody closed.
Where strategy execution actually breaks
The best evidence here comes from Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull. They surveyed nearly 8,000 managers across more than 250 companies for Harvard Business Review. Two of their findings describe my Incomplete Circles theory almost exactly.
First, more than 80% of the companies studied ran at least one formal system for managing commitments across silos, including cross-functional committees, service-level agreements and project offices. Yet only 20% of managers believed those systems worked well all or most of the time (Sull, Homkes & Sull, 2015). Second, only 9% of managers said they could rely on colleagues in other functions all the time. They also reported missing commitments three times more often because another unit failed them than because their own team fell short.
Read that carefully, because it reframes the whole problem. Execution does not break at the point of effort. It breaks at the handover, where one person’s finished work becomes another person’s unclosed circle.
The same pattern reaches the top of the house. In a separate study of 124 organisations, only 28% of the executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could name three of their company’s strategic priorities (Sull, Sull & Yoder, 2018). At one company in that research, 97% of senior leaders had told the engagement survey they clearly understood those priorities. Leadership issued the communication and then assumed the understanding. Nobody verified the circle as closed. Periodic checking for clarity is crucial.
Why the open circles stay invisible
Here the research turns genuinely useful, and a popular idea needs correcting. Business Leaders have heard of the Zeigarnik effect, the claim dating from 1927 that we remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones. A 2025 meta-analysis in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications pooled 59 publications and tested that claim alongside its lesser-known sibling, the Ovsiankina effect.
The memory advantage did not survive. Across 38 studies, the ratio of recalled interrupted tasks to recalled completed tasks came out at 0.99, meaning no real difference at all. What did survive was the pull. People resumed interrupted tasks roughly 67% of the time when given the chance, well above what chance alone would produce (Ghibellini & Meier, 2025).
If you read those together you can state the management problem in a sentence, as: Open circles keep pulling your people into them, without reliably making that visible. They consume capacity while staying invisible to the very systems meant to track work. That is why no register, no dashboard and no monthly review can reliably capture where your organisation’s energy actually is being consumed, and why strategy execution failure so often surprises the people closest to it.
The cost lands on the work you think you are doing
An Incomplete Circle does not cost you the value of the work left undone. It costs you the drag it places on everything else. Sophie Leroy demonstrated this in Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, naming the mechanism attention residue. When someone switches away from a task, part of their attention stays behind and performance on the next task suffers. The residue runs worse when they leave that previous task unfinished (Leroy, 2009).
Masicampo and Baumeister found the same pattern in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Unfulfilled goals produced intrusive thoughts during unrelated reading, and poorer performance on unrelated problem-solving (Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011). Across a management team carrying dozens of unclosed items each, explains why capable people feel permanently busy while the numbers move slowly. They are not underperforming. They are paying a tax on work others did not close formally.
Curious where your own open circles are costing you? A short conversation is usually enough to locate the first few. https://100dayrenew.com/booking/
Closure is not the same as completion
That distinction matters enormously in a business. You cannot finish everything, and no sensible leader should try. What you can do is convert every open circle into an owned, dated, specific commitment. That discharges the drag even while the work continues. An unassigned intention costs you. An assigned one does not, provided the assignment is real rather than decorative.
The Full Potential insight: A business does not reach its Full Potential by opening more circles. It gets there by raising its closure rate. Capacity released from closing what is already open is the cheapest growth capital any business has. It needs no funding, no hiring and no permission from the market.
Why leaders keep opening new ones
If closure creates so much value, why do we keep adding rather than finishing? Rose Hollister and Michael Watkins addressed this in Harvard Business Review under the heading of initiative overload. From their consulting work they name impact blindness, multiplier effects as each layer adds its own projects, political logrolling and plain inertia (Hollister & Watkins, 2018). Their remedies read as closure mechanisms, because that is what they are. Count every live initiative. Attach a sunset clause. Make each one reapply for resources annually, and say plainly that stopping something is no confession of failure.
I would add one observation from our own engagements. Most organisations have no accepted way to declare a circle dead. Nobody wants to be the person who killed the Chairman’s idea from the earlier year, so the initiative gets neither resourced nor buried. It sits there, drawing attention and blocking the slot. Or simply not mentioned.
Three legitimate endings, and drift is not one of them
We now build this directly into how we structure work, because leaving it to good intentions has never worked. Every open circle in a business has exactly three legitimate endings:
- Complete — someone delivers the intended outcome and someone else verifies it, rather than merely reporting it.
- Convert — the circle folds into a larger piece of work, carrying a named Owner and a date across with it. Nothing goes missing in the handover.
- Kill — leadership formally stops the circle, announces it, and releases the resource. A killed circle counts as a closed circle, and it should carry no stigma.
Drift is not an ending; it is the absence of one. Any item still open after two review cycles without moving into one of these states has stopped being a project. It is now a standing charge on your management bandwidth. My test with leadership teams runs to four questions per circle. Who owns this, as a person rather than a function? What does closed look like in observable terms? By when, and what does the business get back? Most teams cannot answer the second question for a third of their initiatives, which explains why those initiatives never end. We need to constantly feed clarity. In extra doses.
A word on the numbers you will hear elsewhere
You will often see it claimed that 70% of change initiatives fail. I have deliberately avoided that figure. Mark Hughes traced five published instances of the claim in the Journal of Change Management and found no reliable evidence behind any of them (Hughes, 2011). The trail leads back to an informal estimate in an early-1990s book on reengineering. The Incomplete Circles argument needs no inflated numbers to stand up.
Where to start
Start with a count, not a plan. Ask your leadership team to list every initiative, commitment and unresolved decision live in their area, including the ones they would rather not raise. In our Business Diagnostic work that list usually runs two to three times longer than the team expected, and roughly half the items have no identifiable Owner. A wishlist of sorts.
Then apply the three endings. Killing a quarter of the list usually costs nothing and releases more capacity than a hiring round would. That paid capacity is a big point. Avoiding strategy execution failure has far less to do with finding a better plan than with closing what the last one opened. The businesses that compound well over decades are not those with the most ambitious intentions. They are the ones that close what they open, in time, before the small circles find each other and turn into something bigger, scary and expensive.
Book a Business Diagnostic and let us map the open circles in your business. Talk to us: https://100dayrenew.com/booking/
References
- Ghibellini, R. & Meier, B. (2025). Interruption, recall and resumption: a meta-analysis of the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina effects. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, 962. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05000-w — Peer-reviewed meta-analysis of 59 publications.
- Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181. — Peer-reviewed experimental research.
- Masicampo, E. J. & Baumeister, R. F. (2011). Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667–683. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024192 — Peer-reviewed experimental research.
- Sull, D., Homkes, R. & Sull, C. (2015). Why strategy execution unravels — and what to do about it. Harvard Business Review, 93(3), 57–66. Reprint R1503C. — Survey research by academic authors in a practitioner journal; nearly 8,000 managers across 250+ companies.
- Sull, D., Sull, C. & Yoder, J. (2018). No one knows your strategy — not even your top leaders. MIT Sloan Management Review, February 2018. — Survey research by academic authors in a practitioner journal; 124 organisations.
- Hollister, R. & Watkins, M. D. (2018). Too many projects. Harvard Business Review, September–October 2018. Reprint R1805C. — Consulting observation published in a peer-edited management journal. The listed causes of initiative overload derive from the authors’ client work, not from a controlled study.
- Hughes, M. (2011). Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail? Journal of Change Management, 11(4), 451–464. https://doi.org/10.1080/14697017.2011.630506 — Peer-reviewed critical review.
A note on sources. References 1 to 3 are peer-reviewed experimental and meta-analytic research. References 4 and 5 are large survey studies run by academics and published in practitioner journals; the samples are substantial but the data is self-reported. Reference 6 is practitioner observation rather than controlled research, and the text describes it as such. Reference 7 appears specifically to correct a widely repeated statistic. The Incomplete Circles framing itself, and the Complete–Convert–Kill structure, are my own practitioner constructs drawn from 45yrs of corporate and consulting work. I offer them as a working model, not as a research finding.