The gap between strategy and execution is a behavior problem.
Why do motivated organizations struggle to close the gap between intentions (what they want to do) and behavior (what they do in practice)?
Most people agree there is a persistent gap between what organizations decide to do and what happens in day-to-day work. Leaders set a direction. Teams understand the direction. And then, somehow, the work drifts:
- Projects deliver outputs nobody uses
- Processes get built and ignored
- Changes get announced and abandoned within months
- Project portfolios balloon while project completion shrinks
Many organizations hire consultants expecting that tighter process, better training, or a clearer direction will solve these problems. Sometimes, that's true.
But more often, these serve as low-impact levers that don't get to the root of the problem — the VES Framework does.
The VES Framework starts by acknowledging an important fact: leaders have far less power than they think they do. The real power to move an organization lives in the hundreds of "micro-decisions" that teams make every day, collectively and individually. Decisions like:
- What is important for me to do right now?
- Is this rule worth following closely?
- Should I route around the process to get a quicker or better result?
- Should I take the time to get this perfect, or do the minimum and move on?
- Should I share what I'm doing or work more quickly on my own?
The micro-choices people make every day determine where the organization really goes.
If you want to move faster on the right things, create the conditions where doing the right thing feels natural.
Every day, people make their micro-decisions based on three quiet questions.
Organizations don't move based on strategy documents or leadership endorsements. They move based on the accumulated weight of thousands of small choices made by the people doing the work. What to prioritize. Whether to escalate. When to speak up. How closely to follow the process.
Most of these decisions aren't deliberate. They're automatic responses to the surrounding conditions — what's rewarded, what's penalized, what takes effort, what's easy to skip. People read the environment and act accordingly, whether or not that lines up with what the strategy deck says they should do.
No amount of governance can compensate for a lack of safety. Heavy governance often makes the problem worse — teaching people that visibility carries more risk than silence.
The visible 20% gets all the attention.
When a gap forms between intent and behavior, most organizations reach for the same set of tools: more communication, more training, another round of executive sponsorship, maybe a refreshed FAQ. Those tools address the visible portion of the problem: awareness and skill gaps. That's real work, and it matters.
But it accounts for roughly 20% of what shapes behavior. The other 80% lives in the system itself: who has decision rights, what the incentive structures reward, what informal norms govern how work gets done, and whose behavior gets noticed. These are the forces that answer the VES questions on behalf of the people inside the organization — often in ways that run directly counter to the stated strategy.
This is why traditional strategy execution and change management playbooks so often fail at scale. The playbook addresses the part of the problem it can see. Meanwhile, the environment is answering the three filters in ways the playbook didn't account for. A team gets trained on a new process, returns to the same incentive structure, and reverts within weeks. The environment overpowered the training.
When the obstacles have been cleared and people are still working around the system, the problem lives in the traffic pattern.
Research supports this pattern. A 2021 analysis published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) examined more than 200 studies on behavior change and found that interventions targeting environmental and structural factors produced consistent results across different types of organizations and contexts. Interventions focused on individual motivation and awareness were far less reliable.
The questions don't change. The subject of the diagnosis does.
VES is most useful when the symptom is a behavior gap — the distance between what strategy calls for and what's actually happening in day-to-day work. Three of the most common places to run the test:
When a PMO is struggling with speed and discipline
When a PMO is perceived as slow or bureaucratic, adding more governance rarely helps. The better move is to check whether existing processes are failing one of the three filters. A status report nobody reads isn't valuable. A portfolio tool that takes three hours to update isn't easy. An intake process that publicly exposes gaps in project definition isn't safe. Running the VES test on the PMO's own outputs often reveals why internal customers are routing around them.
When a project is struggling to get user adoption
A new system goes live with training and leadership endorsement. Within weeks, people go back to their spreadsheets and old shortcuts. The standard response is more communication and more training. VES asks a different question: has the change made the work easier and less risky — or just differently hard? When the answer is "differently hard," adoption problems aren't a surprise. They're predictable.
When an organizational change is stalling
Large-scale changes — new operating models, post-merger integrations — often fail for a reason the change playbook doesn't reach. The environment underneath hasn't shifted. Incentives still point toward the old behavior. Metrics still track what used to matter. The fastest way to do the work is still the pre-change way. VES surfaces that misalignment before the organization spends another cycle blaming adoption on "change fatigue."
For PMO directors: when workarounds and surface-level adoption show up across multiple initiatives, the pattern usually points to something bigger than any single project's change plan can address. The organizational conditions that answer the VES questions — incentive structures and the informal norms people follow in practice — are often the same conditions creating drag across the whole portfolio. Better change management on every individual project won't solve a systemic issue. The pattern has to be named across initiatives, and the diagnosis has to reach the leaders who hold the structural levers.
A four-step test you can run before your next meeting.
Pick one behavior that isn't happening the way strategy calls for. Read it from the perspective of someone doing the work on an ordinary day, not from the executive sponsor's chair. The honest answer almost always lives in the gap between what strategy assumes and what a Tuesday afternoon actually feels like.
The Three Questions
- Is it valuable?Does this feel worth doing well amid competing priorities? If the answer is no or unclear, that's the first drag point — clarify outcome before adding pressure.
- Is it easy?Has enough drag been added that doing it the old way is more efficient? Could steps be removed without losing rigor? Could a handoff be eliminated, or a tool automated?
- Is it safe?What does someone risk by following the process — and what do they risk by skipping it? Does visibility feel safer than silence? Can someone raise a problem without it becoming a performance issue?
Pick a behavior that's not sticking. We'll point you to the broken filter.
Think of a single process, tool, or behavior your team isn't adopting the way strategy calls for. Answer three quick questions from the perspective of the person doing the work.
Here's where the drag is.
More communication and training won't reach the broken filter. Start by redesigning the environment around it.
VES is the fast signal. The Momentum Map is the full diagnosis.
VES is a fast first-pass diagnostic, but it doesn't tell you why the answer to one of the three questions is no. For that, the underlying execution system has to be examined across the six dimensions that shape behavior. That's the territory of the Momentum Map — the broader diagnostic framework Sara uses with clients to trace root causes across the full system of work.
From signal to root cause.
Diagnosing which filter is broken is the first step. Understanding why it's broken — and where the lever sits — is the work of the Momentum Map.
A case study where standard change management fell short.
Why Do Motivated Teams Resist Change?
A walk-through of how an organization applied VES to a system rollout where traditional change management had fallen short — and what they did differently once they saw which filter was broken.
Read the issueThe VES Framework — Executive Brief
A 7-page printable PDF for your team or board. Same content, designed to share.
Questions about the VES Framework.
Sara Gallagher.
Sara Gallagher is President of The Persimmon Group and a recognized expert in strategy execution, PMO leadership, and project portfolio management. For more than fifteen years, she has helped organizations — from Fortune 500s to fast-moving startups — bridge the gap between big ambitions and tangible results.
A frequent speaker, author, and instructor, Sara has contributed to publications including PMI.org, CIO Magazine, and PM Playbook, and has delivered international keynotes on strategy execution, organizational change, and high-performing teams. Her consulting portfolio spans energy, finance, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and technology with projects ranging from industrial mega-projects to enterprise transformations.
Sara is the author of Big Dumb Questions, a newsletter for PMO leaders and executives who want to see strategy move off PowerPoint and into the real world.