Most Strategy Problems Are Execution Problems. Most Execution Problems Are Decision Problems.
Leadership teams spend significant amounts of time and money on strategy. The plan looks clear when it comes out of the offsite. Six months later, it didn’t move. Not because people didn’t agree with it, but because no one knew how to make the decisions that sit between the strategy and the work.
Which initiatives get resourced when there isn’t enough capacity for all of them? Who decides when two priorities conflict? What happens when the market changes and the plan needs to adapt? These aren’t strategy questions. They’re decision questions — and most organizations don’t have a reliable process for working through them together.
What PRESSURE Does for Strategy Execution
PRESSURE gives leadership teams a structured decision process for the choices that strategy requires. It doesn’t replace your strategy framework. It fills in the gap between having a plan and executing it consistently.
We typically run PRESSURE in strategy contexts such as:
- An annual or quarterly leadership alignment session, focused on the decisions the team needs to make to stay on strategy
- A mid-year course correction when the plan is clearly off track and the team needs to agree on what changes
- A deep dive on a single high-stakes strategic decision — entering a new market, a major investment, a significant organizational change
Who This Is For
- CEOs and senior leadership teams working through multi-year strategy execution
- Division or business unit leaders managing competing priorities
- Chief Strategy Officers and their teams designing decision governance
- Organizations where the strategy is clear, but execution is inconsistent
Problems We Help With
- Strategy that looks clear on paper but doesn’t show up in weekly work
- Priority overload where everything is important and nothing moves
- Unclear accountability — the plan exists but no one owns the decisions
- Mid-year drift where the team isn’t sure which parts of the original plan still apply
The Execution Gap Is a Decision Gap
Research from MIT Sloan and others consistently shows that strategy fails not in planning but in the moment-to-moment decisions that either reinforce or undermine it. Teams don’t fail because they choose the wrong strategy. They fail because they don’t have a way to make the thousands of smaller decisions that strategy requires.
PRESSURE builds that capability — not as a one-time workshop, but as a repeatable process your leadership team can use on its own.
Strategy Execution Canvas
Strategy work usually produces a clear slide deck and a messy reality. Teams keep doing what they were already doing, and nothing material changes. This canvas is for leadership teams who want to make the specific, sometimes uncomfortable decisions that turn a strategy into work people actually do.
See how the PRESSURE Model applies during other buying scenarios:
Buying Team
Most buying committees have plenty of information and still feel stuck. The real friction is getting a group of smart people to line up behind one decision. This canvas gives your buying team a simple way to work through a complex purchase together, step by step, and leave with a decision everyone understands and owns.
Deal Decision
Late-stage deals often sit in “maybe” for weeks with no clear movement. Underneath that, the buying group hasn’t finished its internal decision. This canvas helps you and your champion see where the deal is stuck, what decisions the buyer still needs to make, and what you can do next to help them move.
Technology Adoption
New systems go live, dashboards look good, and people quietly keep using their old spreadsheets. The missing piece is a set of clear decisions about behavior and support, not more training sessions. This canvas helps you name the behavior changes that matter, who owns them, and how you’ll support them so the technology is used the way you intended.