Why the realistic plan loses

A founder's view on how strategies get green-lit for the wrong reasons, then what it would take to fix that.

The game every candidate plays

An election is coming. Four parties publish their manifestos, all playing the same game which is to make the most credible large promise in a field of competing large promises. The numbers start to climb.

Three of them decide to fix the housing crisis. The first pledges 1,000,000 new homes in 5 years. The second raises it to 1,500,000. The third goes further, promising 1,700,000 homes in the same window. The numbers are not competing on feasibility. They are competing on the appearance of ambition, weighted against the appearance of credibility.

This is not a story about foolish voters or dishonest politicians. It is a story about incentive structures. In any environment where multiple options compete for a finite resource, in a limited window, where the people deciding cannot independently verify the assumptions behind what they are being shown, the rational move is to make the biggest promise that still sounds believable. Not because it always wins, but because the incentive to do it is structurally baked in regardless of outcome.

I have been in that room

I worked for a scale-up where a product lead told everyone that every customer would want a new feature. One team for six months including all the planning. Despite pushback, the theme persisted, that “every customer wants this, why would we not build it, we would be crazy not to.” In the end it accounted for less than 1% of usage.

Nobody was lying and nobody was trying to game the system. A confident claim, made by a credible person, in a room that did not have the time or the tools to interrogate it, hardened into a six-month roadmap commitment.

I have sat in enough of those meetings to know the pattern. Three teams walk in with three forecasts. Almost inevitably the biggest one starts with an advantage, not because it is the most rigorously evidenced, but because it is the most dazzling. The person presenting knows far more about the assumptions behind their number than anyone evaluating it. The board has a few days at best, they’re busy people! The presenter has had weeks, so in that environment a bigger number does not just feel more attractive. It scores higher and looks more impactful. The realistic plan, the one that honestly accounts for the ramp and the dependencies and the things that will go wrong, presents a smaller number. That smaller number tends to start at a structural disadvantage.

There is something worth being honest about though. The bigger number is not always wrong. I have seen markets where the ambition was justified, where the data supported the scale of the claim. The American market is enormous compared to the UK, but regulations and entrenched competition can mean your actual addressable market is a fraction of what the headline figure suggests. A market worth £1,000,000,000 where 95% is dominated by a longstanding established player with deep pockets is not the same as a £1,000,000,000 opportunity presented on paper. The question is not whether the number is large, the question is whether it was tested against reality or chosen because it won the room.

The green light and what follows

Business strategy can therefore be green-lit the same way the party wins the election. From that moment the machinery of execution is supposed to follow. What actually follows, in both cases, is the gap between what was promised and what the conditions on the ground allow.

I once consulted with an enterprise client who had committed to savings running into the millions from a strategic initiative. The team was not in place, the plan was not in place, the assumptions had not been stress-tested. Because of this the requirements changed constantly with the loudest voice running the show. Small tweaks compounded over time into huge additional effort. Timelines got pushed back, the scope of releases constantly reduced, more people thrown at the problem, but nobody owning what actually mattered… The decisions. Including the most important one, whether to kill it.

The excuses were all reasonable and they mostly always are. But those conditions were visible before the initiative was approved. They were not named in the proposal because naming them honestly would have reduced the headline saving. A reduced saving loses to a bigger one.

A new government takes office and within weeks the same pattern appears. The previous administration left things in a worse state than we knew. There are structural problems to fix before we can deliver on what we promised. Infrastructure neglected, systems already broken, dependencies that were never resolved. Those conditions were visible before the election too. They were not named in the manifesto for exactly the same reason.

What asking "how" actually looks like

Go back to the housing pledge and imagine a different campaign. One that opens with a different question: given everything that is true about the current state of the planning system, the construction workforce, the material supply chains, what can we actually commit to building?

Run that exercise honestly and 1,700,000 does not survive it. The number that survives is smaller, maybe 800,000, but it is real. It accounts for the ramp, the constraints, the things that will go wrong. 800,000 homes that actually get built beats 1,700,000 that was never possible. A smaller promise you can keep is worth more than a bigger one you cannot.

The trouble is that the honest candidate enters the room at a structural disadvantage. The other candidates have had months to build the case for their number. The voter has an evening. Neither has the time or the independent expertise to interrogate the readiness behind what they are being told. So the decision gets made on what is presented, not on what is true. What is presented is optimised for the room, not for the delivery.

Execution readiness is the missing link

We were still hiring the team five weeks after the initiative officially started. New people being onboarded while slowing down the existing team, because they had to help everyone get up to speed with the codebase. That is not a planning failure. It is an execution readiness failure. The initiative was greenlit before the conditions required for it to succeed were in place.

Execution readiness is the discipline most organisations skip entirely. Once a strategy is greenlit the budget gets allocated and work begins, but what rarely happens in between is the honest question of whether the organisation is actually ready to execute the thing it just committed to. The skills the initiative needs may not be in the team. The supplier it depends on may not yet be contracted. The technology it assumes may not yet exist. These are not risks to be monitored after execution begins. They are readiness gates. The moment to assess them is before the first pound is spent rather than after the first quarter has slipped.

What gets committed when a strategy is greenlit is not just budget. It is time, people, opportunity cost, the credibility of the people who made the promise. The only honest question before any of that is committed is whether the organisation can actually do the thing it is saying it will do. If the answer has conditions attached, those conditions need to be visible, scored and most importantly owned before the vote is taken.

The signal nobody built a path for

The question is not whether a signal exists that a strategy is off track. It almost always does. The question is whether the organisation has built a system that lets it travel from the people who can see it to the people who need to act on it before the gap has compounded into something expensive.

Most do not have that system. Status reports show green while reality drifts. Capacity gets committed before strategy is stress-tested. Work continues that nobody can honestly trace back to a goal. Projects that should have been stopped months ago keep consuming capacity, because there was never a moment agreed in advance where someone was allowed to say the gap is too wide, let us stop. When those organisations do finally stop to review, there is rarely an honest retrospective. The same mistakes repeat because nothing changed about how the next round would be run. The plan is treated as a thing to defend rather than a position to update. A plan you are only allowed to defend is a plan you can never learn from.

What we are building

Execution readiness is the missing link between strategy and execution. A beautifully crafted but unrealistic strategy is much worse than a less attractive but realistic one.

We are incentivised to push for the biggest number because we do not have the time, collectively, to challenge it. There is currently no tool that gives true transparency into how an idea came to be, what assumptions it rests on, whether those assumptions were ever tested against reality. So we bloat the middle. More analysts, more project managers, more transformation and change people, all trying to do the same thing, which is to assess what is already happening rather than structurally stress-testing the strategy that produced it. We are responsible for spotting drift, but drift happens everywhere, every hour of the day. We cannot physically do it. It is not a human problem to fix. It is a systems problem.

That is why we are building Pulse OS. To stack strategy with the principles that govern it, so decisions get made not on inference but on clarity. Not to add another layer of reporting, but to be the system that connects what an organisation is trying to achieve to what it is actually doing, in real time, before the cost of not knowing has already been paid.

Before I vote. Show me how.

See how Pulse OS stress-tests strategy before you commit. Sign up free at www.pulseios.com.