Sensemaking & the Strategy-Execution Gap
You're running experiments. Your team is validating hypotheses, shipping MVPs and gathering real customer data. The work is good. And then it stalls. Defunded mid-flight. You realise you're in proof-of-concept purgatory… Or worse, quietly deprioritised because someone's pet project has political cover and yours doesn't.
What I find consistently, is that innovation leaders blame execution. They hire better. They try new frameworks. They push harder. But the problem often isn't execution. It's that the organisation can't complete a learning cycle. Your team learns something valuable and the system has no way to absorb it.
The loop that isn't closing
There's a framework from military strategy developed by John Boyd, the OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) that I was introduced to at Blue Chilli, a startup accelerator in Sydney, where we helped early-stage founders build a rhythm of rapid validation. It's useful here not necessarily as something to adopt, but as a diagnostic question: can your organisation move from observation through to action and back again without the signal being disrupted somewhere in the middle?
For most innovation teams I work with, the answer is no. And the break isn't where they think it is.
Where the loop breaks
In our work with enterprise innovation and strategy teams, we use a diagnostic called the Strategic Pulse. It assesses six dimensions that together describe how well an organisation translates strategic intent into execution. When I map the OODA loop across these dimensions, a pattern emerges, and it explains why good innovation work keeps dying.
Observe - your teams are usually strong here
This is Dimension 4 (Validation and Learning) and Dimension 2 (Market and Strategic Direction) territory. Innovation teams tend to be good at gathering signals: running experiments, talking to customers, watching competitors. The data exists. The learning is happening.
Orient - this is where it breaks
Dimension 1 (Vision and Enterprise Priorities) and Dimension 3 (Strategy, Portfolio and Measurement). Orientation is about synthesising what you've observed into a coherent view that can inform decisions. In Boyd's original model, this is the most critical step, it's shaped by culture, experience, and existing mental models.
What I find in enterprise is that the strategy layer isn't synthesising what innovation teams are learning. Executive narratives are set annually. Portfolio reviews are backwards-looking. The wealth of insight sitting in innovation teams; what customers actually want, which assumptions are broken, where the real opportunities are, never makes it into the room where strategic priorities get set.
Your experiments generate signals. The organisation doesn't orient around them.
Decide - slow, political, not evidence-informed
Dimension 1 (Vision and Enterprise Priorities) and Dimension 3 (Strategy, Portfolio and Measurement). Decision rights are unclear or overridden. Capital reallocation happens annually, not when evidence demands it. Initiatives that should be killed continue because stopping work is seen as failure rather than a discipline to foster. And the decisions that do get made aren't informed by the data your teams have generated, they're informed by whoever has the most political capital in the room.
Act - even when decisions land, integration fails
Dimension 5 (Capabilities, Culture and Organisational Design) and Dimension 6 (Innovation Governance, Autonomy and Integration). This is the valley of death. Your experiment worked. Leadership agreed to scale it. And then... nothing. No integration pathway. No resources allocated. Business units see it as a threat to existing revenue. The operating model can't absorb it.
Dimension 6 is where I see the most consistent gap in enterprise innovation. Strategic licence is vague. Protected time is theoretical. Innovation teams lack the political credibility to challenge business unit assumptions. And there's no resourced path from experiment to core operations. Your proven innovation dies at the border of the organisation that funded it.
What this actually looks like
I was working at a large general insurer. The strategy was digital first. My remit was home and motor quote flows, with a goal to create cross-product selling opportunities.
My team did the observation work, analytics on multi-policy customers, call centre recordings, conversations with service designers and customers. We developed a clear hypothesis: offering additional products on the post-purchase page would increase multi-policy holders by a measurable amount.
Then the loop nearly broke. Risk wanted to limit exposure, so we needed an experiment we could flag on and off. We had no dedicated delivery team. The usual enterprise friction. What saved us was building a sandbox, a test environment where we could observe how customers interacted with designs before going live. It helped us align risk and compliance, iterate through several design versions, and validate with 100 customers before shipping anything.
We went live. Within six weeks, the hypothesis was validated.
But here's the part that matters for this conversation: the sandbox didn't just validate one experiment.
It became the default method for testing in-quote experiences for our teams. What started as a workaround for one team's resource constraints became an organisational capability. Time-to-decision shortened. Experimentation went from exception to norm.
The loop closed. Observation fed orientation, which fed better decisions, which enabled faster action, which generated new observations. And critically, the learning didn't stay trapped in one team, it changed how the organisation operated.
What you can take to your exec table
If your innovation work keeps dying, stop looking at your team's execution and start asking where the organisational learning loop is broken.
The Strategic Pulse diagnostic gives you a structured way to surface this. It assesses six dimensions, from vision alignment through to innovation governance and shows exactly where strategic intent fractures on its way to execution. For innovation leaders, the diagnostic typically reveals that the problem isn't in your dimensions (validation, experimentation) — it's in the dimensions above and around you (priorities, portfolio decisions, integration architecture).
That reframe matters. It shifts the conversation from 'why isn't innovation delivering ROI?' to 'why can't the organisation absorb what innovation is learning?'
Three things to take into the next exec conversation:
Where is the learning loop broken? Can your team's experimental data actually reach the people who set strategic priorities — and does it change their decisions?
What's dying in proof-of-concept, and why? If proven innovations can't transition to core operations, that's not an innovation failure. It's an integration architecture failure.
What's the cost of a broken loop? Every experiment that validates something valuable but goes nowhere is wasted capital, wasted time and wasted credibility for your function.
The frameworks aren't the work. They're diagnostic tools. The work is closing the loop, making sure that what your teams learn actually changes what the organisation does next.
