Most organizations don't discover that strategy and execution have drifted apart until a quarterly review turns up a miss they can't fully explain. By then, the drift has usually been building for months. The good news is that catching it early doesn't require a formal audit — it requires five honest minutes and a willingness to hear uncomfortable answers.
We built this short diagnostic for leadership teams to run on their own, between the larger organizational assessments we typically lead. It won't replace a full engagement, but it reliably surfaces where attention is needed.
The questions
- Can every leader in the room state this quarter's top priority in one sentence — and do the sentences match? If they don't, execution is already fragmented, whether or not it shows up in the numbers yet.
- Where did we spend the most unplanned time this quarter, and did it map to a stated priority? Time spent is the truest record of actual priorities, more honest than any strategy deck.
- What decision has been sitting unmade for more than thirty days? Stalled decisions are usually a proxy for unresolved disagreement about direction.
- Which team is quietly working around another team's process, rather than through it? Workarounds are an early warning system for systems that no longer fit how the organization actually operates.
- If a new hire joined the leadership team tomorrow, what would confuse them most about how we operate? This question tends to surface blind spots the rest of the team has stopped noticing.
What to do with the answers
The value isn't in scoring the answers — it's in noticing where the room goes quiet, or where answers diverge sharply between leaders who should be seeing the same picture. That divergence is the signal. Treat it as the starting point for a real conversation, not a report to file away.
Run this quarterly, and it becomes an early-warning system. Skip it, and you'll find the same gaps six months later, in a board meeting, framed as a performance problem instead of an alignment one.
