What the MIT Sloan research actually found
In a case study published in MIT Sloan Management Review, Donald Sull and colleagues documented a CEO who did something most leaders never do: she tested whether her executives actually understood the company's strategy, rather than assuming they did.
The result was the 97%/50% split. Nearly every executive reported high confidence in their strategic understanding. Fewer than half could demonstrate it when asked to name the company's top priorities without prompting.
That case study sits inside a larger finding. Sull's research showed that only 28% of executives and middle managers who are directly responsible for executing strategy could list three of their company's strategic priorities. These are not frontline employees. These are the people running the business.
Kaplan and Norton, writing in Harvard Business Review, put a number on the downstream effect: 95% of employees don't understand their company's strategy. The problem cascades from leadership to every level of execution.
This is not a motivation problem. People are not failing to execute because they don't care. It is an information problem that shows up as execution failure. The signal never made it through, and no one measured whether it did.
Why the gap exists even after constant communication
The standard response when strategy stalls is "we communicated the strategy constantly." That response is almost always true and almost always irrelevant.
Communication frequency doesn't guarantee comprehension. Presenting strategy and measuring whether it landed are two different activities. Most organizations do the first. Almost none do the second with any regularity.
All-hands meetings produce alignment on the day of the meeting. Ninety days later, that alignment has decayed, been overwritten by daily operational noise, or been distorted by individual interpretation. The problem is structural: strategy is presented as an event, but it needs to be tracked as a condition.
COOs and Chiefs of Staff often feel this acutely. They can point to the deck that was presented, the email that was sent, the team meeting where it was discussed. What they cannot point to is current data on whether their team understands and believes in the direction right now, today, before the next quarterly review.
What strategy leaders are currently measuring (and why it's insufficient)
The tools most teams rely on were not built to detect the strategy execution gap. They measure adjacent things.
OKR completion rates
Tell you whether tasks are done, not whether the team understands why those tasks were chosen. A team with 90% OKR completion can still have low strategic comprehension -- they are executing instructions, not internalizing direction.
Engagement surveys
Tell you how people feel about their work: satisfaction, motivation, belonging. They do not measure whether employees understand the strategic direction or believe it is achievable. High engagement and low alignment coexist regularly.
Quarterly business reviews
Look backward. By the time a QBR surfaces a misalignment problem, it has already cost you a quarter of execution capacity. QBRs are diagnostic, not predictive.
None of these instruments answer the core question: does my team understand our strategy and believe it is achievable with current resources? That question requires a different kind of measurement entirely.
What alignment intelligence gives the COO and Chief of Staff
Alignment intelligence is the category of signal that sits between your planning cycle and your performance review. It gives strategy leaders a live read on strategic comprehension and belief across the organization, not just at the moment of the offsite.
For a COO or VP of Strategy running a team of 50 to 500 people, four signals matter most:
Monthly comprehension signal
Where is strategic understanding strongest and weakest by team, function, or level? Not how the all-hands went -- how the strategy actually sits right now.
Belief score
Does the team think the strategy is achievable given current resources and constraints? Comprehension without belief is fragile. People can understand a direction and still not execute it with full commitment.
Direction of change
Is alignment building or eroding between planning cycles? A single data point is a snapshot. A trend line tells you whether your interventions are working.
Gap between senior and frontline
The MIT Sloan data showed the gap primarily at the executive and manager level. Alignment intelligence surfaces where the breakdown is concentrated so you can address the right layer.
This is what's missing between the offsite and the quarterly review. The planning cycle produces a strategy. The QBR evaluates performance. Alignment intelligence tells you whether your team is carrying the strategy into the space between those two events.
See how Pulse measures alignment on your team
30 minutes. We'll walk through how comprehension and belief scores work for a business team at your scale, and what the signal looks like before and after a planning cycle.
Frequently Asked Questions
We just ran an all-company OKR cascade. Isn't that enough to align the team?
OKR cascades tell people what to do. Alignment measurement tells you whether they understand why. Those are different instruments. A team can complete every OKR deliverable without having internalized the strategic logic behind them. The distinction matters when conditions change and you need your team to make good judgment calls without waiting for direction.
How is Pulse different from the engagement surveys we already run?
Engagement surveys measure how your team feels about their work: satisfaction, motivation, belonging. Pulse measures whether they understand and believe in where the organization is going. You can have high engagement scores and near-zero strategic alignment -- MIT Sloan's case study showed exactly this. Both measurements matter; they are not the same measurement.
How often should we run Pulse check-ins for a business team?
Monthly is the standard cadence for most teams. Quarterly is the minimum that produces useful trend data. Annual is too slow -- by the time you see the gap in an annual review, you've lost a quarter of execution capacity. Monthly check-ins keep the signal current and give Chiefs of Staff real-time visibility between planning cycles.