Organizations confuse strategic intent with strategic decisions. Intent is what you want your strategy to be. Decisions are the choices that actually create strategy. Intent lives in presentations. Decisions live in budget allocations, hiring plans, product roadmaps, and what gets built or killed.
Most organizations have clear strategic intent and unclear strategic decisions. Leadership articulates where the company should go. But when individual resource allocation decisions get made, they don’t consistently support that direction. The accumulated decisions create a different strategy than the stated intent.
This isn’t a communication problem. Everyone heard the strategic intent. It’s a decision-making problem. The organization makes thousands of tactical decisions without explicit connection to strategic intent. Those decisions compound into actual strategy, which diverges from intended strategy.
What Strategic Intent Actually Is
Strategic intent is directional. It states where the organization wants to compete and how it wants to win. It provides aspiration and focus. It answers questions like:
“We intend to be the enterprise platform of choice for financial services.”
“We intend to compete on reliability and security rather than features.”
“We intend to shift from project-based services to product-based recurring revenue.”
Strategic intent is valuable. It creates a shared understanding of direction. It helps teams make sense of their work within a larger context. It provides criteria for evaluating opportunities.
But strategic intent alone doesn’t create strategy. Strategy emerges from decisions. Without decisions that implement the intent, it remains an aspiration.
What Strategic Decisions Actually Are
Strategic decisions are specific, consequential choices about resource allocation. They include:
Budget allocation decisions. Which teams get funding increases? Which gets cut? Which initiatives get resourced adequately? Which gets token funding?
Hiring decisions. Which roles get approved? What skill sets are prioritized? Where does headcount growth happen? Which teams stay flat?
Product decisions. Which features get built? Which customer segments get prioritized? Which technical debt gets addressed? Which gets deferred?
Market decisions. Which segments to enter or exit? Which geographies to invest in? Which customer types to pursue aggressively versus opportunistically?
Partnership decisions. Which capabilities to build versus buy? Which vendors to commit to? Which integration investments to make?
Sunset decisions. Which products get killed? Which initiatives get stopped? Which teams get disbanded? Which revenue streams get abandoned?
Each decision is tactical in isolation. But decisions accumulate. The pattern of decisions reveals what the organization actually prioritizes. That pattern is the real strategy.
The Intent-Decision Gap
The gap between strategic intent and strategic decisions appears in predictable patterns:
Intent: Enterprise Focus, Decisions: SMB Optimization
Stated intent: “We’re becoming an enterprise-focused company. Enterprise customers represent our future.”
Actual decisions:
- Product roadmap prioritizes features SMB customers request
- Sales comp plan rewards deal velocity over deal size
- Customer success team sized for high-touch SMB support
- Marketing spend concentrated on channels that drive SMB leads
- Engineering architecture optimized for fast deployment, not enterprise security requirements
The intent points toward enterprise. Every individual decision optimizes for SMB. The accumulated decisions produce an SMB strategy regardless of stated enterprise intent.
Intent: Platform Play, Decisions: Feature Factory
Stated intent: “We’re building a platform. We need to think long-term about architecture and extensibility.”
Actual decisions:
- Engineering sprints filled with customer-specific feature requests
- Technical debt continuously deferred
- Platform team kept minimal while feature teams grow
- API documentation and developer experience deprioritized
- Integration capabilities built reactively, not proactively
The intent describes platform strategy. The decisions produce feature-driven consulting services packaged as software.
Intent: Quality Over Speed, Decisions: Ship Faster
Stated intent: “Quality is our differentiator. We will not compromise quality for velocity.”
Actual decisions:
- Sprint commitments based on feature count, not quality metrics
- QA team sized at 1:10 ratio to engineering
- Automated testing deprioritized when schedules slip
- Production bugs addressed after next feature ships
- Performance optimization treated as nice-to-have
The intent emphasizes quality. The decisions optimize for shipping velocity. Quality degrades predictably.
Intent: Innovation Leader, Decisions: Fast Follower
Stated intent: “We’re innovators. We lead the market with new capabilities.”
Actual decisions:
- R&D budget flat as percentage of revenue
- Product roadmap reactive to competitor launches
- Innovation initiatives get funding only after market validation elsewhere
- Technical talent hired for execution, not research
- Risk-taking discouraged in performance reviews
The intent positions the organization as innovative. The decisions produce fast-follower strategy with innovation marketing.
Why the Gap Persists
Several forces maintain the gap between strategic intent and strategic decisions:
Intent is aspirational, decisions are constrained. Intent can ignore current reality. “We intend to dominate the enterprise market” is unconstrained by current capabilities. Decisions must account for what’s actually achievable with available resources and capabilities.
Intent is centralized, decisions are distributed. A small group defines strategic intent. Thousands of decisions happen across the organization. Each decision-maker interprets intent differently and faces different local constraints.
Intent is stable, decisions adapt. Strategic intent shouldn’t change quarterly. Individual decisions must respond to changing conditions: customer feedback, competitive moves, technical challenges, resource availability. The adaptive decisions drift from static intent.
Intent is political consensus, decisions reveal priorities. Strategic intent gets crafted to satisfy multiple stakeholders. It’s broad enough that everyone can agree. Decisions force real trade-offs. The trade-offs reveal actual priorities that may contradict consensus intent.
Intent has no resource implications, decisions do. Stating strategic intent costs nothing. Decisions allocate finite resources. When resources are insufficient for all stated priorities, decisions must be made. The choices create strategy that differs from intent.
Intent is visible, decisions are opaque. Everyone sees the strategic intent in presentations and documents. Most strategic decisions happen in small meetings, email threads, and individual approvals. The accumulated impact of invisible decisions only becomes apparent over time.
Decision Coherence Creates Strategy
Strategy isn’t what you intend. Strategy is what emerges from coherent patterns of decisions.
If every budget decision prioritizes short-term revenue over long-term capability building, the strategy is short-term revenue maximization regardless of stated long-term vision.
If every hiring decision optimizes for filling seats quickly rather than finding specific expertise, the strategy is growth through available talent rather than capability-driven growth.
If every product decision favors what’s easiest to build rather than what creates competitive advantage, the strategy is operational efficiency over market differentiation.
Organizations with strong strategy make coherent decisions. Each individual decision might look small. But the decisions align toward a consistent direction. They reinforce each other. They compound.
Organizations with weak strategies make incoherent decisions. Each decision is locally rational but globally misaligned. They cancel each other out. They fragment resources. They prevent progress in any clear direction.
The difference between strong and weak strategy isn’t quality of strategic intent. It’s the coherence of strategic decisions.
The Missing Decision Framework
Most organizations lack frameworks that connect strategic intent to tactical decisions. They articulate intent at leadership level. They make decisions at an operational level. No explicit mechanism ensures decisions implement intent.
This creates several problems:
Decision-makers lack context. The manager approving a budget reallocation doesn’t necessarily understand how that decision affects strategic intent. They optimize for local criteria.
No clear decision criteria. When choices involve trade-offs, what determines priority? If strategic intent doesn’t translate to decision criteria, the criteria become political negotiation or manager judgment.
Strategic implications aren’t visible. Small decisions seem inconsequential individually. Nobody tracks how accumulated decisions diverge from strategic intent until the divergence is obvious and substantial.
Feedback loops don’t exist. The organization doesn’t measure whether decisions align with intent. Misalignment accumulates without detection until outcomes reveal the gap.
Course correction is reactive. By the time leadership recognizes decisions aren’t implementing intent, the organization has made months or years of misaligned decisions. Correcting requires unwinding commitments.
Organizations that connect strategic intent to strategic decisions build explicit frameworks:
Decision principles derived from strategy. Strategic intent translates to specific decision rules. “Enterprise focus” becomes “When choosing between enterprise and SMB features, enterprise gets priority unless explicitly excepted.”
Required approvals for strategic deviation. Decisions that contradict strategic intent require explicit exception approval. This makes deviation visible and forces justification.
Regular decision audits. Leadership reviews recent budget, hiring, and product decisions against strategic intent. Patterns of misalignment trigger investigation and correction.
Metrics that track decision alignment. Measure what percentage of budget goes to strategic priorities. Track headcount allocation to strategic initiatives. Monitor product decisions against strategic roadmap.
Explicit trade-off resolution. When decisions involve trade-offs between strategic priorities, there’s a clear process for resolution that references strategic intent rather than political power.
Budget as Decision Record
The budget is the most complete record of strategic decisions. It shows what the organization chose to fund and what it chose not to fund. These choices reveal actual strategy more accurately than strategic intent documents.
Compare strategic intent to budget allocation:
Intent: “AI and machine learning are our top strategic priority.”
Budget: 5% of the engineering budget allocated to ML infrastructure. 3% of headcount in data science. 80% of computers spend on existing systems.
Revealed strategy: Maintain existing systems while conducting minimal ML exploration.
Intent: “Customer success is critical to our retention strategy.”
Budget: Customer success team sized at 1:200 customer ratio. The support tooling budget declined. Success playbook development unfunded.
Revealed strategy: Accept higher churn to minimize support costs.
Intent: “We’re investing in our people. Employee development is a priority.”
Budget: Training budget 0.5% of payroll. Manager training eliminated. Internal mobility program staffed with one person.
Revealed strategy: Hire externally for new skills rather than developing internally.
The budget doesn’t lie. It shows what decisions were actually made about resource allocation. Those decisions constitute strategy regardless of stated intent.
Organizations serious about implementing strategic intent should build budgets that reflect that intent. If the budget doesn’t fund strategic priorities adequately, either the budget is wrong or the strategic intent is aspirational fiction.
Hiring Decisions Shape Strategy
Hiring decisions accumulate into strategic direction. Who the organization hires reveals what capabilities it values and what direction it’s actually heading.
Intent: “We’re becoming a product company, not a services company.”
Hiring pattern: Sales roles for professional services. Delivery consultants. Project managers. Product team static.
Revealed strategy: Grow services revenue. Product remains secondary.
Intent: “Engineering excellence and technical innovation drive our competitive advantage.”
Hiring pattern: Junior engineers hired at scale. Senior IC roles unfilled for months. Engineering managers prioritized over technical leads.
Revealed strategy: Build through volume of people rather than technical excellence.
Intent: “We compete on design and user experience.”
Hiring pattern: Design team sized at 1:50 ratio to engineering. UX research position open for six months. Visual design prioritized interaction design.
Revealed strategy: Design is a finishing layer on engineering-driven products.
Hiring decisions shape organizational capabilities. Capabilities determine what strategies are executable. If hiring decisions don’t build capabilities required for strategic intent, the intent becomes unachievable regardless of aspiration.
Product Decisions Reveal Competitive Strategy
Product roadmap decisions reveal what competitive strategy the organization is actually pursuing, regardless of stated positioning.
Intent: “We compete through superior user experience and ease of use.”
Product decisions: Roadmap driven by feature parity with competitors. Complex features built because competitors have them. UX improvement initiatives continuously deprioritize.
Revealed strategy: Feature parity competition. Ease of use is marketing, not product strategy.
Intent: “We’re the premium option with best-in-class capabilities.”
Product decisions: Free tier with generous limits. Pricing pressure leads to continuous discounting. Premium features given away to win deals.
Revealed strategy: Volume-based competition at discount pricing.
Intent: “We build platform capabilities that enable ecosystem growth.”
Product decisions: API development deprioritized. Integration partnerships unfunded. Developer documentation minimal. The platform team can’t get resources.
Revealed strategy: Build point solutions, call them a platform for marketing purposes.
Each product decision seems tactical. Build this feature. Price at this level. Support this integration. But accumulated product decisions determine competitive positioning more than stated strategy.
The Stopping Decision Gap
Strategic decisions include what to stop, not just what to start. But most organizations only make starting decisions. This creates decision debt.
New strategic initiative gets funded. This is a decision. It gets announced, resourced, tracked.
Old initiative continues by default. This isn’t an explicit decision. It’s the absence of a stopping decision. Nobody chose to continue it. Nobody chose to stop it. It persists.
Over time, the organization accumulates initiatives. Each was strategic when started. Most are no longer strategic. But stopping requires an explicit decision. Starting only required initial approval.
The accumulation of non-stopped initiatives fragments resources. New strategic priorities get marginal funding because existing work consumes budget by default. Strategic intent can’t get implemented because resources are locked in legacy commitments.
Organizations that make strategic decisions explicitly choose what to stop:
“We’re exiting this market segment. These products sunset on this timeline.”
“This integration partnership isn’t strategic. We’re deprioritizing maintenance to redeploy resources.”
“This customer segment requires too much custom work relative to revenue. We’re not renewing these contracts.”
“This technical architecture doesn’t support strategic direction. We’re funding migration and sunsetting the old system.”
These stopping decisions free resources for strategic priorities. Without stopping decisions, strategic intent never gets adequate resourcing. It exists as marginal experimentation while legacy work consumes capacity.
The Yes-By-Default Decision Culture
Many organizations operate yes-by-default decision cultures. New initiatives get approved unless there’s an explicit reason to decline. This prevents strategic decision-making.
A yes-by-default culture produces:
Resource fragmentation. Everything that seems valuable gets funded at some level. Nothing gets funded adequately. The organization does many things poorly rather than few things well.
No prioritization. If everything gets approved, nothing is prioritized. Teams can’t distinguish strategic from non-strategic work. Everything is equally important, which means nothing is important.
Strategic drift. The accumulation of yes decisions creates direction independent of strategic intent. The organization drifts toward whatever gets proposed rather than what strategy requires.
Political allocation. When resources are insufficient for all approved initiatives, allocation becomes political. The best-connected teams get resources. Strategic alignment is coincidental.
Strategic decision-making requires no-by-default culture for anything not explicitly strategic. The default answer to proposals is no unless they demonstrably advance strategic priorities. This forces explicit connection between decisions and intent.
“This seems valuable” isn’t sufficient justification. “This implements our strategic priority of X by doing Y, and we’ll measure success through Z” is required.
No-by-default cultures maintain strategic focus. They prevent decision accumulation that fragments resources. They ensure decisions implement intent rather than individual team preferences.
Time-Bound Strategic Decisions
Strategic decisions should have temporal boundaries. “We’ve been investing in this market for 18 months. At 18 months, we evaluate results and decide whether to continue, expand, or exit.”
This prevents decision debt accumulation. If the investment doesn’t produce expected results, there’s an explicit decision point for stopping. Resources don’t get locked indefinitely in underperforming initiatives.
Most strategic decisions lack temporal boundaries. “We’re entering this market” has no end date. The initiative continues regardless of results because there’s no scheduled decision point for evaluation and potential exit.
This creates zombie initiatives. They’re not succeeding but not explicitly failing. They consume resources indefinitely. Nobody wants to propose killing them because that’s admitting failure. They persist through inertia.
Time-bound strategic decisions force evaluation and renewal:
“We’re funding this initiative for two quarters. At the end of Q2, we review results against these criteria. If criteria are met, we expand investment. If not, we shut it down or pivot.”
This clarity serves multiple purposes:
Resource commitment is bounded. Teams know investment isn’t indefinite. They optimize for demonstrating value within the timeframe rather than assuming perpetual funding.
Evaluation criteria are explicit. Success metrics get defined upfront. There’s an objective basis for continuation decisions rather than political negotiation.
Stopping isn’t failure. Initiatives that don’t meet criteria get stopped as planned decisions, not as failure admission. This reduces organizational resistance to killing non-working initiatives.
Resources get periodically freed. Regular decision points allow resource reallocation from non-strategic to strategic work. Resources don’t get permanently locked in legacy commitments.
The Reversibility Question
Strategic decisions vary in reversibility. Some decisions are easily reversed if they prove wrong. Others create commitments that are difficult or expensive to unwind.
Easily reversible decisions:
- Hiring contractors or consultants
- Marketing campaign spend
- Feature prioritization within existing architecture
- Partnership exploration
Difficult to reverse decisions:
- Hiring large permanent teams
- Infrastructure commitments with long-term contracts
- Architectural choices that lock in technical approaches
- Market positioning that shapes brand perception
- Customer segments that create reputation and reference dependencies
Organizations should make reversible decisions quickly and irreversible decisions slowly with extensive analysis. But many organizations do the opposite.
Fast irreversible decisions: “Let’s hire 50 people for this new initiative.” Hiring is fast. If the initiative fails, the organization has 50 people optimized for the wrong strategy. Reversing through layoffs is politically and financially expensive.
Slow reversible decisions: “Let’s spend six months analyzing whether to run this marketing campaign.” Marketing spend is reversible. If it doesn’t work, stop spending. The slow decision process delays learning.
The reversibility question should inform decision process:
For reversible decisions: Decide quickly. Execute. Measure. Adjust. The cost of being wrong is low. The value of learning is high. Speed matters more than certainty.
For irreversible decisions: Decide slowly. Analyze thoroughly. Ensure alignment with strategic intent. Build conviction. The cost of being wrong is high. Certainty matters more than speed.
Strategic intent helps distinguish which decisions are strategic (irreversible or high-stakes) versus tactical (reversible or low-stakes). Without this distinction, organizations apply the same decision process to all choices, creating either analysis paralysis on trivial decisions or reckless speed on critical ones.
Decision Accumulation Reveals Strategy
Strategy isn’t visible in individual decisions. It emerges from decision accumulation over months and years.
A single hiring decision reveals little. Hiring patterns over two years reveal strategic direction. Did engineering headcount grow relative to sales? Did senior IC roles get prioritized over management? Did the organization build certain capabilities while neglecting others?
A single product decision reveals little. Product decisions over multiple quarters reveal competitive strategy. Are you building features competitors don’t have or matching features competitors do? Are you investing in platform or point solutions? Are you optimizing for new customer acquisition or existing customer expansion?
A single budget cycle reveals little. Budget trends over years reveal resource allocation strategy. Is R&D spending increasing or declining as percentage of revenue? Are certain teams consistently growing while others stay flat? Is discretionary spending going to strategic priorities or distributed equally?
Organizations that track decision accumulation can detect drift from strategic intent before it becomes a crisis. Leadership reviews accumulated decisions quarterly or annually:
“We intended to focus on enterprise. But 75% of engineering decisions in the past six months were optimized for SMB. Either we change our decisions or we change our stated intent.”
“We intended to compete on quality. But 80% of sprint commitments prioritized velocity over quality work. We’re implementing a speed strategy regardless of quality intent.”
This decision audit reveals whether tactical decisions implement strategic intent. If they don’t, the organization faces an explicit choice: change the decisions or change the intent. Maintaining the gap is the worst option.
The Strategy-Decision Feedback Loop
Effective strategic decision-making requires feedback loops:
Intent → Decisions: Strategic intent translates to decision criteria and principles. When decisions are made, they’re evaluated against intent.
Decisions → Outcomes: Decisions produce measurable results. Market response, revenue impact, customer behavior, competitive position.
Outcomes → Intent Revision: Results inform whether strategic intent is correct. If decisions that implement intent produce poor results, the intent may be wrong.
Most organizations have weak feedback loops:
No Intent → Decision connection. Strategic intent exists separately from decision processes. Decisions get made without explicit reference to intent.
No Decision → Outcome tracking. Individual decisions aren’t tracked to outcomes. The organization can’t determine which decisions were correct.
No Outcome → Intent revision. Strategic intent persists regardless of results. Even when outcomes clearly indicate the strategy isn’t working, intent doesn’t update.
This produces strategic paralysis. The organization makes decisions disconnected from intent. Results don’t inform future decisions. Intent doesn’t adapt to reality. Strategy becomes a static document rather than a dynamic learning process.
Building feedback loops requires:
Explicit decision criteria from intent. “Enterprise focus” translates to “When budget decisions involve trade-offs between enterprise and SMB, enterprise wins unless explicitly accepted.”
Decision logging and tracking. Major strategic decisions get recorded with expected outcomes and measurement approach.
Regular review of decision outcomes. Did the decision produce expected results? If not, why not? Was the decision wrong or was the intent wrong?
Intent revision based on learning. If multiple decisions implementing the intent produce poor results, the intent gets questioned and potentially revised.
This creates a learning organization where strategy evolves based on decision outcomes rather than persisting as unchanging aspiration.
The Delegation Problem for Strategic Decisions
Strategic intent gets set at leadership level. Strategic decisions get made throughout the organization. How does intent translate to decisions made by people who weren’t involved in creating the intent?
This requires several elements:
Clear decision authority. Who can make which decisions? At what budget threshold do decisions require escalation? Which decisions are strategic (require senior approval) versus tactical (can be made locally)?
Explicit decision principles. How should decision-makers evaluate trade-offs? When multiple good options exist, what criteria determine priority?
Context about strategic reasoning. Why did leadership choose this strategic intent? What were the alternatives? What assumptions underlie the strategy? Without context, teams can’t make decisions that implement intent intelligently.
Examples of good and bad decisions. Concrete examples help teams understand what decisions align with intent. “Choosing to build feature X rather than Y was strategically aligned because…” “Choosing to enter market A was strategically misaligned because…”
Regular feedback on decision quality. Teams make decisions. Leadership provides feedback on whether those decisions implemented strategic intent. This builds organizational capability for strategic decision-making.
Most organizations delegate decision authority without providing decision principles, context, examples, or feedback. Teams make decisions based on local optimization, individual judgment, or political pressure. The decisions diverge from strategic intent because teams lack framework for implementing it.
When Intent Should Follow Decisions
Sometimes the right response is changing strategic intent to match revealed strategy from accumulated decisions.
This makes sense when:
Decisions reflect reality that intent is ignored. Intent assumed certain market conditions. Decisions adapted to actual conditions. The decisions are correct. The intent was based on wrong assumptions.
Emergent strategy is working. The accumulated decisions created a different strategy than intended. But the results are good. Market response is positive. My competitive position is improving.
Intent is politically driven rather than strategically sound. Strategic intent was crafted for investor relations or board presentation. It doesn’t reflect what the organization is actually capable of or what markets actually require.
Capabilities don’t support intent. The organization lacks capabilities needed for intended strategy. Decisions reflect what’s actually achievable. Building required capabilities would take years.
Revising intent to match decisions isn’t failure. It’s honesty. It allows the organization to have real conversations about whether the revealed strategy is correct and what would be required to change it.
The dishonesty is maintaining intent that doesn’t match decisions. That creates confusion about what the organization is actually doing and prevents optimization of the actual strategy being pursued.
Making Strategic Decisions Work
For strategic decisions to implement strategic intent requires:
Small number of clear priorities. If strategic intent includes ten priorities, it provides no decision guidance. When decisions involve trade-offs between priorities, there’s no basis for choice. Three priorities maximum.
Explicit trade-off rules. When priority A conflicts with priority B, which wins? This should be clearly specified, not left to individual judgment or political negotiation.
Resource allocation authority. Someone has responsibility for ensuring budget and headcount decisions align with strategic intent. They can challenge misaligned decisions and force justification or reversal.
Visible decision tracking. Major strategic decisions are logged publicly. Teams can see what decisions were made and what criteria were used. This builds shared understanding of how strategy translates to decisions.
Regular decision audits. Leadership reviews accumulated decisions quarterly. Patterns of misalignment trigger investigation. Either decisions need to change or intent needs to change.
Consequences for misalignment. Teams that consistently make decisions contradicting strategic intent face consequences. Resources get reallocated. Leadership changes. This signals that strategic alignment matters.
Celebration of good strategic decisions. Teams that make difficult decisions that implement strategic intent get recognized. This reinforces that strategic decision-making is valued.
Most organizations do none of this. Strategic intent gets announced. Decisions happen without connection to intent. Nobody tracks alignment. There are no consequences for misalignment and no rewards for alignment. Strategic intent becomes empty rhetoric.
The Real Test
The test of whether an organization has strategy is not whether it has strategic intent. It’s whether it makes coherent strategic decisions.
Strategic intent is necessary but insufficient. Intent provides direction. Decisions create movement. Direction without movement is paralysis.
Organizations with strategic intent but incoherent decisions stay busy while going nowhere. Teams work hard. Progress happens in many directions. No competitive advantage emerges because effort isn’t concentrated toward coherent strategic direction.
Organizations with coherent strategic decisions and weak strategic intent still build competitive advantage. The decisions compound. They reinforce each other. They concentrate organizational capability. The strategy might not be articulated well, but it’s real.
The ideal is clear strategic intent implemented through coherent strategic decisions. Intent provides the direction. Decisions provide the implementation. Results validate or invalidate the intent. The feedback loop enables learning.
But if forced to choose between clear intent with incoherent decisions versus unclear intent with coherent decisions, coherent decisions win. Strategy is what you do, not what you say you intend to do.
Most organizations have the words but not the decisions. They articulate strategic intent effectively. They make tactical decisions independently of that intent. The words don’t guide the decisions. The decisions don’t implement the words.
Closing this gap requires recognizing that strategic intent alone isn’t strategy. Strategy emerges from accumulated strategic decisions. The organization’s real strategy is visible in its budget, its hiring, its product roadmap, what it stops doing, and how it allocates attention.
That strategy may or may not match stated strategic intent. The gap between intent and decisions is the gap between aspiration and reality. Organizations that close this gap build sustainable competitive advantage. Organizations that maintain it stay perpetually aspirational while competitors with decision coherence pull ahead.