Most strategies don't fail because the plan was wrong. They fail at the intersection of two much quieter things: whether the people responsible for it were ever genuinely committed, and how quickly the team lets go once things get difficult. Neither failure looks dramatic in the moment. Both are common enough that it's worth understanding exactly how they connect — because they're rarely two separate problems. Usually, one causes the other.
The commitment problem
Gary Latham, one of the two researchers who spent decades building what's now called Goal-Setting Theory, put it plainly:
A leader can assign an objective. They can track progress against it. They can hold someone accountable when it slips. None of that is the same as commitment — and commitment can't be created directly, only the conditions for it: whether someone understands why the goal actually matters, whether they know what success looks like, whether they can see how their own work connects to it, and whether they have real room to influence the outcome. Get those right, and people stop completing tasks because they were told to, and start solving problems because they feel responsible for the result.
The abandonment problem
The second failure is almost the opposite instinct, and just as common: letting go of an objective too easily once circumstances change. Most organisations aren't stubborn about strategy — if anything, the more common failure is the reverse. The moment something gets genuinely hard, "the situation changed" becomes a convenient, socially acceptable reason to quietly stop pursuing it, whether or not that's actually true.
This gets worse the further a review cycle drifts from how the business actually operates. A quarterly review is a reasonable cadence for a stable operating environment. It's a much harder ask for a team that's genuinely fighting fires week to week — by the time the quarter's review arrives, so much has already happened that the review becomes a retrospective on a plan nobody's been actively steering for weeks, rather than a genuine course-correction. The gap between "we have a strategy" and "we're actually running it" widens fast under those conditions, especially without real support in between reviews.
The link between adaptability and performance itself is well established — not from one study, but from a genuinely large body of evidence. A 2025 systematic review in Management Review Quarterly examined 249 separate empirical studies on organisational agility, spanning nearly three decades of research, and found the same underlying pattern held consistently across almost all of them.
What that same body of research has spent far less time on is the practical question that actually matters day to day: not whether adaptability helps, but how a leadership team decides, in the moment, whether a given change in circumstances genuinely warrants abandoning course — versus simply being the easiest excuse available.
Why these two are the same problem wearing different clothes
A team that's genuinely committed to an objective is much harder to talk out of it just because the week got difficult. A team that was only ever assigned the objective needs almost no excuse at all to let it go — and "we're adapting to change" is a much more comfortable story to tell than "we never really believed in this."
The fix: decide the rule before you're under pressure
The moment a team is actually deciding whether to hold the line or change course is the worst possible moment to be deciding it for the first time — it's exactly when the pressure to quietly let go is highest, and exactly when judgment is least reliable. The better approach is deciding, in advance, what would genuinely justify changing course, before anyone's under pressure to rationalise giving up.
In practice, that means having an honest, decided-in-advance way to answer one question: is the underlying capability to actually deliver this still there, or not? A quick group score on whether the current processes and conditions can genuinely support each objective — done before the pressure moment, not during it — gives a team something to check against other than how the week is going. It's the difference between "are we actually still capable of this" and "do we feel like continuing," and only one of those two questions is reliable under stress.