That journey changes things.

Every additional organisational layer introduces interpretation. Product teams need enough technical precision to represent what they actually deliver, while Marketing needs a story that can travel across channels and audiences. Sales needs something that works in conversation rather than something that only reads well in a strategy document. Country teams need enough flexibility to deal with local competitors, languages and customer expectations. None of those groups is necessarily resisting the strategy when they adapt it. In many cases, they are trying to make it work.

The difficulty is that a series of individually sensible adaptations can gradually create something very different from what leadership originally approved.

I experienced this at considerable scale while working at DS Smith. The company was going through a broader strategic and brand transformation, and the new group-level story needed to work across a business operating in more than 27 countries. Central Marketing, Product, Innovation, PR, regional teams and local markets all had legitimate reasons to care about how that story was expressed. Sales then had to take the result into customer conversations where clarity and relevance mattered more than internal completeness.

The strategic work itself was not the main problem. The harder question was whether the organisation could use it consistently without each part of the business having to reconstruct the story for itself.

That became particularly visible through the sales-enablement work. Showpad had already been selected as the platform, and it would have been relatively straightforward to treat the assignment as a technology rollout supported by refreshed content. The real issue was more fundamental. If the material inside the platform remained too long, too technical, too fragmented or too detached from actual customer conversations, better technology would simply make weak material easier to find.

We therefore spent considerable effort rebuilding the commercial stories themselves. Around 95 sales presentations were redeveloped with stakeholders across the business, with the aim of making them shorter, more visual and more useful in real conversations. The work required more than editing slides because every simplification raised questions about what mattered most, what could be removed, which claims different stakeholders were willing to support and how much local variation could be allowed before the central story began to fragment.

That is where strategy implementation becomes much more complicated than communication.

A launch email can tell people that the strategy has changed. A town hall can explain the rationale. A brand book can document the language and visual identity. Training can help people understand what has been decided. None of those activities guarantees that somebody facing a customer six weeks later will know which part of the strategy matters in that conversation, how to explain it naturally and what evidence to use when the customer challenges the claim.

This distinction matters because organisations often diagnose poor adoption as a communication problem. When local teams continue using old presentations or Sales creates its own material, the immediate conclusion may be that people have not understood the strategy properly or have failed to follow the agreed process. Sometimes that is true. At other times, the behaviour is telling leadership something more useful: the centrally approved version has not yet been translated into something that works under real commercial conditions.

There is a substantial difference between knowing what the company wants to say and being able to use that thinking effectively in front of a customer.

Large organisations make this harder because different groups operate under different forms of pressure. A central brand team is naturally concerned with consistency, while Product wants accuracy and local teams need relevance. Sales needs speed, adaptability and a story that can survive questions from a buyer who has no interest in the internal work that produced it. If those tensions are not resolved in the design of the commercial system, they are resolved later by individuals in the field.

That is usually when fragmentation begins.

The salesperson removes the slides that take too long to explain. The country manager rewrites a message because the terminology does not work locally. Product adds more detail because an important distinction has been lost. Marketing creates another version for a campaign. Each decision has a reasonable explanation, but the organisation gradually accumulates multiple versions of the same strategy.

From headquarters, the business may still appear aligned because everyone recognises the same strategic language. In the market, however, customers begin encountering different interpretations of what the company stands for, what matters most and why they should choose it.

The problem is therefore not simply whether people have received the strategy. The more important question is whether the organisation has converted strategic intent into a form that can survive repeated use.

That requires a different standard for implementation.

At DS Smith, some of the most useful evidence came from observing what happened when the material reached actual customers. One senior account director used the platform during a customer dinner because the relevant material was accessible and useful enough to support the conversation in that moment. In another situation involving a larger buying committee, the engagement data after the meeting showed that the people repeatedly reopening the proposal were not the same people who had spoken most during the presentation. The tool was valuable because the content and the commercial process around it had become usable, not because the platform had technically been deployed.

That kind of evidence is much more meaningful than internal adoption statistics on their own.

A strategy becomes operational when people can make better decisions because of it. Sales should know which story to use and which proof matters. Marketing should be able to create campaigns without inventing a new interpretation of the positioning each time. Product should recognise the commercial story without feeling that the substance has been reduced beyond recognition. Local markets should be able to adapt the approach without rebuilding the strategic logic from the beginning.

When those things are not possible, people compensate.

This is one reason old materials survive long after a rebrand or transformation has officially launched. The old presentation may be visually outdated and strategically imperfect, but the salesperson knows how to use it. Familiarity gives it practical value. Replacing that behaviour requires more than telling the organisation that a better story now exists. The new story has to become easier to use than the workaround it is replacing.

The same principle applies beyond rebrands.

A new go-to-market strategy can be completely rational at leadership level and still fail because account teams do not know how it changes their choices. A post-acquisition strategy can be approved while the acquired businesses continue selling through different propositions and processes. A new segmentation model can exist in a presentation while Marketing, Sales and Product continue using their previous definitions of the customer.

In each case, the strategy technically exists while the operating behaviour remains largely unchanged.

That is why I have become sceptical of transformation milestones that place too much emphasis on approval and launch. Those moments matter because organisations need decisions and visible commitment from leadership. They are simply much earlier in the process than they often appear.

The more useful questions begin afterwards.

Can people apply the strategy without repeatedly asking what it means in their context? Can different functions make compatible decisions from it? Can local teams adapt it without damaging the central logic? Can Sales use it under pressure when the customer asks an unexpected question? Can leadership recognise when repeated local adaptation signals a genuine problem in the strategy rather than a failure of discipline?

Those questions reveal whether strategic thinking has become organisational capability.

They also explain why implementation frequently takes longer than expected. Leadership may need several months to make the strategic choices, but thousands of smaller decisions determine whether those choices become real. Some concern content, others concern systems, ownership, incentives, terminology, training, governance or local adaptation. None looks as important as the original strategy decision, yet together they determine what eventually reaches the customer.

The challenge for senior leadership is therefore to protect the essential logic of the strategy without assuming that consistency means literal uniformity. A multinational organisation cannot expect every market, product and salesperson to use identical language in identical circumstances. Some adaptation is necessary because commercial reality varies. The leadership task is to distinguish between adaptation that preserves the strategy and adaptation that gradually replaces it.

That distinction requires clarity about what is genuinely non-negotiable.

If the organisation cannot explain which parts of the strategy must remain consistent and which parts can be adapted, local teams will make that decision themselves. They may do it intelligently, but the result will depend on individual judgement rather than shared commercial architecture. As the organisation grows, the accumulated variation becomes increasingly difficult to manage.

The ultimate test of a strategy is therefore not whether senior leadership believes in it or whether employees can repeat its key messages. The test is whether the organisation can continue making coherent decisions from it once the original strategy team is no longer in the room.

That is the point at which approval becomes implementation.