You’ll recognise this story if you’ve ever…

• Asked a regional VP what the company’s top priority was and gotten a different answer than the one your COO gave you that morning
• Watched your January strategy deck stop being referenced sometime around April, with no one really noticing
• Had a board meeting where the most current information you presented was already three weeks old
• Spent the better part of a week trying to reconstruct what actually happened last quarter

The challenge

Every region was running well. The company wasn’t sure it was running together.

Construction at this scale isn’t really one business. It’s hundreds. Every active site has its own schedule, its own crew, its own subs, its own owner breathing down somebody’s neck about a milestone. Project executives learn to run their patch on instinct. They have to. Nobody at corporate knows the ground conditions on a specific build the way the superintendent on it does.

That autonomy is the strength of the business. It’s also where the strategy goes to die.

Every year, the executive team gathered for three days, hammered out a set of priorities for the coming year, and walked out with something they genuinely believed in. Safety first. Margin protection. A push into newer market segments. Closing projects on time without burning out the field. The deck looked good. The deck always looked good.

Then it landed in the regions. And something happened to it on the way.

• Two regional offices both reported they were “focused on margin protection” and only realised late in the year they’d defined it completely differently. One had tightened procurement. The other had been pushing crews harder. Same words. Different strategy. Different outcomes.
• A safety initiative the COO had spent months designing arrived at a project trailer as a new form. Stripped of the why. Stripped of the urgency. Just another piece of paper between a foreman and his coffee.
• When commodity prices moved and corporate needed to pivot, that pivot took most of a quarter to actually change how estimators were behaving. By the time it landed, the market had moved again.
• Before every board meeting, the chief of staff’s team spent the better part of two weeks chasing regional updates and reconciling spreadsheets. By the time the deck was ready, half of it was already stale.

None of this was unusual. Kaplan and Norton’s research, published in the Harvard Business Review, found that fewer than one in twenty employees can describe their company’s strategy in a sentence. A separate HBR survey of one company’s own middle managers found that half couldn’t name a single one of their top five strategic objectives. This is the normal state of enterprise strategy execution. It’s also why most strategies fail.

The trigger: a question at the Q2 board meeting

The CEO had been in the seat about four months. The January strategy offsite had been hers. She’d pushed hard on one specific pivot. She wanted the company leaning into industrial and renewables work, and pulling back from a saturated civil segment. The exec team agreed. The deck went out. The town halls happened.

At the Q2 board meeting, a director asked her a fair question. How was the pivot going?

She couldn’t really answer. She knew, at a high level, that nothing terrible had happened. But she couldn’t tell the board how much capacity had actually moved. Or whether estimators in the civil group had changed their pursuit criteria. Or whether the renewables team had hired the people the plan had said they’d hire by Q2. She gave the answer most CEOs give in that situation. She said it was tracking. She said she’d come back with detail.

Then she walked out and asked the chief of staff to put the picture together.

It took him most of a week. He talked to five regional presidents. He pulled spreadsheets from three different teams. He cross-referenced commitments against actuals. What he came back with was, in his own words, “fine for a memo, not fine for running a company.” Some of the pivot had landed. Some hadn’t. In two regions, nobody he spoke to could actually tell him whether they were supposed to be deepening into civil or pulling back. They thought they remembered the January meeting differently.

The CEO read the memo on a Friday night. She didn’t sleep well.

They’d tried fixes before. A new quarterly business review process. A strategy dashboard built by an outside firm. A series of town halls. Each helped at the edges. None of it held. The problem wasn’t that the regions were going rogue. They were doing their jobs. The problem was that nobody had built a way for the strategy to actually travel between the boardroom and the trailer, and stay intact along the way.

The search & decision

Most platforms looked fine in a demo. None of them survived contact with a job site.

The strategy office started looking at goal-management tools with one test that mattered more than the rest. Could it survive the field?

This isn’t a software company. The people who’d actually have to use this thing weren’t tech-fluent strategy analysts. They were project executives running three jobs at once, regional VPs who lived in their trucks, superintendents who treated email like a chore. If the platform demanded twenty minutes a week to keep current, it was dead on arrival.

Most of the tools they evaluated failed that test. They were built for tech orgs. Clean cascades, neat hierarchies, everyone sitting at a laptop. The minute the team pushed the structure into something that looked like construction (five regional P&Ls, project teams that came together for eighteen months and then dissolved, joint ventures with their own governance), the platforms started bending in places they shouldn’t.

Profit.co held its shape. That was it. Cascades worked across regional structures. Joint ventures could be modelled cleanly. Check-ins were short enough that a busy project executive would actually do them. The decision came together quickly after that.

The solution

The first thing that changed wasn’t a metric. It was what people talked about on Mondays.

How the OKR programme actually runs

A couple of things surprised the team once it was running.

The check-ins were the big one. Project executives are some of the busiest people in the company. The team braced for resistance to any new weekly task. What actually happened: they liked it. The check-ins were short. The platform reminded them. And for the first time, the things they were already paying attention to (schedule risk, crew issues, owner relationships) got reported in a place where the regional president would actually see them in time to help.

The cascade view was the other one. There’s something about being able to open a screen and see your goal connected to your region’s goal connected to the company’s goal that changes how the work feels. Not in a slogan way. In a “I know why I’m doing this” way. Foremen on big builds started talking about margin protection like it was their job, because they could see how their schedule discipline rolled up to it. That conversation didn’t exist before.

What the team actually opens on a Monday

The results

Two quarters in, the monthly business review stopped feeling like a confession.

Two quarters after rollout, the executive team noticed something they hadn’t entirely predicted. The metrics were moving. Check-ins were up. Reporting cycles were shorter. Strategic pivots were landing faster. That was all real.

But the bigger shift was in the rooms. Regional presidents stopped showing up to the monthly business review with rehearsed narratives. They didn’t need to. The COO already had the picture. So the meeting changed shape. Less status, more decisions. Less defending, more problem-solving. People raised issues earlier because the platform made it obvious when something was off, and not raising it felt worse than raising it.

That’s the part that doesn’t show up cleanly in a metric. When the strategy actually travels, the meetings get better. Then the decisions get better. Then everything downstream of that gets better too.