The Romance of Strategy and the Reality of Monday Morning
Across Abuja, Nairobi, Johannesburg and Washington DC, there is a familiar ritual. Leaders gather in beautiful venues, facilitated by consultants, to craft a bold new strategy. There are flipcharts, break-out rooms, inspiring quotes on the slides and, often, a beautifully bound strategy document at the end. Everyone takes pictures, shares them on LinkedIn, and returns home “energised”.
Then Monday morning arrives. The emails are the same. The political pressures are the same. The budget constraints are the same. The urgent crowds out the important. Three months later, the strategy document is sitting on a shelf; the institution is back to its old patterns. The problem is not that African leaders cannot think strategically. The problem is that our institutions are not designed to execute.
Why Execution Fails: Four Structural Gaps
1. The Translation Gap
The first gap is the translation gap: the distance between high-level strategy language and the work that appears on people’s desks. In many Nigerian ministries or South African state-owned enterprises, the strategy document is written in abstract phrases – “improve service delivery”, “enhance stakeholder engagement”, “drive digital transformation”. But the frontline officer in Enugu, Cape Town or Kisumu is never shown what this means for their tasks, forms, and daily decisions.
In contrast, when the best-performing US agencies finish a strategy review, they invest significant time in creating “strategy-to-task” maps. Supervisors can point to each clause in the document and show how it translates into one or two clear deliverables for their teams. Without that translation, execution becomes a matter of guesswork.
2. The Ownership Gap
The second gap is the ownership gap. Strategy is often seen as the work of the “top” – the Director-General, the CEO, the Permanent Secretary, the Board. Middle managers and frontline staff are treated as implementation tools, not co-owners of the change.
In Kenya, many county governments have beautifully written development plans that sit far away from the daily work of nurses, agricultural officers or revenue collectors. When those workers do not see themselves as authors of the future, they revert to the safety of the past. Execution requires a deep shift: people must feel that they are not just executing orders, but building something that has their fingerprints on it.
3. The Rhythm Gap
The third gap is the rhythm gap. Most African institutions are organised around events – retreats, launches, summits, “100-day” drives – rather than the quiet, repetitive rhythms of weekly review and disciplined follow-through.
Look at high-performing organisations in the United States or globally. They build execution into their calendar: weekly leadership huddles, monthly performance reviews, quarterly learning conversations. These are not ceremonial meetings; they are where decisions are made, bottlenecks are removed and commitments are renewed. Without a predictable rhythm, execution becomes reactive and fragile.
4. The Courage Gap
The final gap is the courage gap. Strategy is change, and change always confronts power, comfort and interests. In South Africa, any attempt to reform a state-owned entity must confront entrenched networks built over years. In Nigeria, digitising processes might threaten those who benefit from manual systems. In Kenya, enforcing performance contracts can upset political balances. It takes moral courage to say, “We agreed to this path; we will stay on it even when it is no longer popular.”
Many leaders underestimate the resistance that serious execution will attract – and overestimate their own willingness to stay firm. When pushback comes, they quietly retreat. The strategy survives on paper but dies in culture.
Building an Execution Engine: A Practical Roadmap
1. Begin With the Non-Negotiables
Execution starts with a small list of non-negotiables. An LCA-style leadership team would ask, “If we can only deliver three things from this strategy in the next 12 months, what must they be?” In a Nigerian regulatory agency, this could be clearing a backlog of licences, implementing a new digital platform, and publishing a transparent service charter. In a US non-profit, it might be launching a new program, hitting a fundraising target, and strengthening governance.
Once the non-negotiables are clear, everything else becomes secondary. Teams can negotiate timelines, but they cannot negotiate away the commitments themselves.
2. Translate Strategy Into Scorecards
Leaders then need to convert big goals into a simple execution scorecard. For each non-negotiable, define a small set of metrics: output, outcome, and behaviour. In a Kenyan hospital, “reduce patient waiting time” might be tracked by average waiting time, patient satisfaction, and adherence to triage protocols. In a South African municipality, “increase revenue collection” might be tracked by bills issued, payments received, and the percentage of customers on digital billing.
The scorecard is not for punishment; it is for focus. It allows leaders to see early where execution is stalling, long before failure becomes visible to the public.
3. Fix the Calendar, Not Just the Org Chart
Real execution change often requires fewer org chart reforms than calendar reforms. Leaders should institutionalise monthly execution reviews and quarterly learning reviews. In Abuja, this could mean that the Permanent Secretary meets monthly with directors to review progress against the scorecard, decide on course corrections, and unblock bottlenecks. In Washington, a federal agency could run “implementation sprints” with fortnightly check-ins.
The goal is to make execution conversations unavoidable. If the calendar is silent, execution will be shallow.
4. Build Internal Change Champions
Instead of outsourcing execution to consultants, institutions need to develop internal change champions. These are mid-level leaders who understand both the technical and the political realities on the ground. In Kenya, this might be county directors who can navigate both community dynamics and national policy. In Nigeria, it might be deputy directors who know how to move files through the system while keeping integrity.
LCA-style programs invest heavily in this layer, giving them coaching, peer learning spaces and tools for leading change from the middle.
5. Make Courage a Leadership KPI
Finally, execution requires courage – and courage needs to be measured. Boards and supervising authorities should ask not only, “Did we hit our targets?” but also, “Where did we hold the line when it was costly?” In South Africa, this might mean protecting a reforming CEO from political interference. In the United States, it could mean defending whistle-blowers who highlight systemic weaknesses.
The more leaders see that courageous decisions are noticed and rewarded, the more execution becomes part of the institution’s character, not just its vocabulary.
What This Means for African Leaders Today
Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya do not suffer from a shortage of strategy documents. They suffer from a shortage of institutions that can execute strategy consistently, decade after decade, regardless of who holds office. Learning from global practice – including the United States – we see that execution is not a mystery. It is the outcome of clear non-negotiables, disciplined scorecards, fixed review rhythms, empowered change champions, and moral courage.
For African leaders, the invitation is simple but demanding: stop treating strategy as an annual event and start treating execution as a daily discipline. If we can close the translation, ownership, rhythm and courage gaps, our institutions will move from vision on paper to impact in people’s lives.
And that is ultimately what strategy is for – not to decorate shelves, but to change stories: the story of a trader in Lagos who can finally register her business without paying a bribe, a student in Mombasa whose school now receives textbooks on time, a township clinic in Cape Town that no longer turns patients away, and a rural community in the Niger Delta whose water project finally works. Execution is where vision meets these lives – or fails them. African leaders cannot afford to fail.
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