How to Break Down a Business Strategy That's "Too High Level"
Most executive teams I've worked with believe their strategy is clear. They've spent months crafting it. Debated the words. Aligned on the priorities.
Then they watch business units interpret it in completely different directions.
The strategy says "accelerate digital transformation." One division builds a data platform. Another launches a customer app. A third hires consultants to redesign processes. All of them believe they're executing the strategy. None of them are wrong. And that's the problem.
The frustration I hear most from strategy leaders isn't that their strategy is bad. It's that it stays trapped at 30,000 feet whilst the organisation needs decision support across all altitudes.
Why Strategy Stays High-Level (And Why That's Not the Real Problem)
High-level strategy exists for good reasons. Boards need direction without operational noise. Investors and C-Suite need a narrative they can repeat. Executive teams need flexibility to adapt as conditions change. The mistake is assuming that "cascading" this strategy downward will create alignment. It won't.
Here's what typically happens:
The executive team publishes strategic priorities. Business unit leaders interpret those priorities through the lens of their own capabilities and incentives. Teams build plans that technically align but practically conflict. Six months later, the CEO asks why execution feels fragmented.
The response is usually: better communication. More town halls. Clearer messaging. Another strategy refresh.
None of this solves the actual problem.
The Missing Middle
Between corporate strategy and operational execution sits a gap most organisations never explicitly address. I call it the missing middle.
Corporate strategy answers: Where are we going and why?
Operational execution answers: What are we building and delivering?
The missing middle answers: How do we decide what to prioritise, fund and kill?
Without this translation layer, every team interprets strategy for themselves. They fill the gap with assumptions, politics, and best guesses. The result is predictable: strategic waste, duplicated effort, and initiatives that technically align with strategy but collectively miss the point.
Most organisations try to solve this through frameworks. Strategy maps. OKR cascades. Portfolio management tools. These help with visibility, but they don't solve the translation problem. They just make the misalignment more visible.
The missing middle isn't a document or a framework. It's a capability,the organisational ability to translate high-level strategic intent into concrete decision-making criteria that teams can actually use.
What the Missing Middle Actually Contains
When I work with organisations to build this translation layer, it typically includes three elements.
Strategic decision criteria
Not goals, criteria. The difference matters.
A goal says: "Grow market share in enterprise segments."
A decision criterion says: "When two initiatives have comparable expected value, prioritise the one with lower execution risk and faster feedback loops."
Goals help you orient around a shared vision, and align strategy. Criteria tell you how to choose between competing options when both seem reasonable. Most strategy documents are full of goals and empty of criteria.
Explicit trade-off guidance
Every strategy implies trade-offs. Few strategies make them explicit.
If the strategy says "innovate" and also says "improve operational efficiency," which wins when they conflict? If a team can either extend an existing product or build something new, how should they decide?
Leaving these trade-offs implicit forces teams to guess, or worse, to optimise for whatever the loudest stakeholder wants. Making trade-offs explicit doesn't eliminate disagreement, but it moves the disagreement to the right level. Executives should be debating trade-offs. Teams should be executing against clear guidance.
Translation boundaries
Strategy needs to specify where interpretation is encouraged and where it isn't.
Some strategic choices should be made centrally and applied consistently. Brand positioning. Core technology platforms. Pricing architecture.
Other choices should be made locally by people with context. Customer engagement tactics. Feature prioritisation within a product. Hiring decisions.
Most strategies are silent on this. The result is either over-centralisation (everything escalates) or fragmentation (every team reinvents the wheel).
Defining translation boundaries doesn't mean controlling everything. It means being explicit about which decisions require consistency and which benefit from local adaptation.
Why This Is Hard (And Why Frameworks Won't Save You)
Building the missing middle is uncomfortable for several reasons.
First, it requires executives to commit to specifics they'd rather leave flexible. High-level strategy is politically safe. You can claim alignment with almost anything. Decision criteria and trade-off guidance force clarity that some leaders would rather avoid.
Second, it exposes gaps in strategic thinking. When you try to articulate how teams should decide between competing priorities, you often discover the executive team hasn't actually resolved those questions themselves. They've deferred the hard choices by keeping strategy abstract.
Third, it's ongoing work, not a one-time exercise. Markets shift. Priorities evolve. The translation layer needs continuous maintenance, not an annual refresh. So many organisations treat strategy as a document to publish, not a capability to build.
This is why frameworks fail. A framework gives you structure for organising information. It doesn't force the hard conversations or build the organisational muscle to maintain clarity over time. You can fill in every box in a strategy map and still have teams pulling in different directions.
What Building This CapabilityActually Looks Like
I've seen organisations build the missing middle in different ways, but the ones that succeed share common patterns.
They start with decisions, not goals. Instead of asking "what are our strategic priorities," they ask "what decisions are teams struggling to make, and what guidance would help?" This grounds the work in real operational friction rather than abstract planning.
They involve the people who have to execute. The translation layer can't be built in an executive offsite and handed down. The people closest to the work know where interpretation breaks down and where guidance is missing. Their input isn't optional, it's essential.
They accept imperfection. The first version of decision criteria and trade-off guidance will be wrong in places. That's fine. What matters is having something explicit that can be tested, challenged, and refined. Implicit assumptions can't be improved because no one can see them.
They build review into operations. The translation layer isn't a strategy document. It's a working tool. The organisations that sustain it treat it like any other operational capability, with regular reviews, clear ownership, and explicit processes for updating it when reality changes.
The Payoff
Organisations that build this capability see measurable improvements.
Portfolio decisions get faster because teams have clear criteria instead of endless debate.
Strategic waste decreases because conflicting interpretations get caught earlier.
Executive time shifts from alignment meetings to actual strategic choices.
And perhaps most importantly, the frustration I hear from strategy leaders,"why isn't our clear strategy translating?", starts to fade. Not because the strategy got simpler, but because the organisation got better at translating it.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Here's an example loosely based on an insurance company I worked with.
Their corporate strategy said: "Become the digital insurer of choice for young families."
Clear enough, right? Everyone nodded. Then three teams went in different directions:
Product team started building a mobile app with gamification
Marketing pushed for social media influencer partnerships
Operations wanted to automate claims processing
All technically aligned with "digital insurer for young families." None coordinated. All competing for the same engineering capacity.
We built the missing middle by forcing specificity:
Strategic Decision Criteria:
When choosing between initiatives: prioritise those that reduce time-to-quote over those that add features
When prioritising digital investments: favour customer-facing over internal process unless internal process is blocking customer value
When evaluating "young families": target first-time parents (0-3 years) over broader family segment
Trade-Off Guidance:
If "digital experience" conflicts with "operational efficiency," choose digital experience for acquisition touchpoints, choose efficiency for servicing touchpoints
If new digital capability requires re-platforming legacy systems, build new alongside old rather than migrate,speed to market wins over technical purity
If we have to choose between breadth (more products) and depth (better experience), choose depth until NPS hits 50+
Translation Boundaries:
Central decisions (must be consistent):
Brand voice and visual identity
Core underwriting rules
Technology platform choices (cloud, core systems)
Pricing architecture
Local decisions (teams decide):
Marketing channel mix and budget allocation
Feature prioritisation within approved products
Customer communication timing and frequency
Hiring and team structure
Within six weeks, the portfolio conflicts resolved themselves. The mobile app pivoted from gamification to quote-speed optimisation. Marketing shifted budget from influencers to performance channels that drove quote starts. Operations deprioritised the claims automation project in favour of quote-process digitisation.
Same strategy. Different translation layer. Completely different execution.
The executive team still debates strategy. But now teams have guidance for the 90% of decisions that don't need executive input. That's what the missing middle does.
So Ask Yourself
If your strategy is sitting at 30,000 feet and your teams need ground-level guidance, the question isn't whether your strategy is clear enough.
The question is whether you've built the translation layer that turns strategic intent into decision-making capability.
Most organisations haven't. They've published strategies and hoped for alignment. They've cascaded goals and called it execution. They've bought frameworks and filled in templates.
None of that builds the missing middle.
Building it requires harder work: articulating decision criteria, making trade-offs explicit, and defining where interpretation helps versus hurts. It requires ongoing attention, not a one-time exercise.
But the alternative,watching clear strategy produce fragmented execution,is more expensive in every way that matters.
