Most leadership teams do not suffer from a lack of priorities. The challenge is proving that the work happening across the organization is connected to them.
That challenge sits behind familiar executive questions:
- Which strategic initiatives are on track?
- Where are we beginning to drift?
- Are our most important teams focused on our most important priorities?
- If a priority changed tomorrow, what work, funding, and capacity would need to move?
The answers should be readily available. In many organizations, however, providing them requires a new round of status requests, spreadsheet reconciliation, and presentation building.
Leaders know what matters. They just cannot always see, quickly and credibly, whether the organization is acting accordingly.
The Clarity trap: Why strategy becomes disconnected from actual work
Research from Atlassian, Leading the human + AI enterprise: A new playbook for strategic portfolio management, based on responses from 308 senior enterprise leaders, reveals a telling contradiction:
| What leaders say | What organizations can demonstrate |
| 80% say their strategic priorities are clear or very clear. | Only 11% have at least three-quarters of their portfolio work explicitly linked to those priorities. |
This is theClarity Trap: The flawed assumption that getting clearer about strategic direction will, by itself, produce stronger execution.
The data points to a different conclusion. Strategic clarity is not the primary constraint. The system connecting that clarity to action is.
Knowing what the organization should do is not the same as connecting that intent to:
- The initiatives receiving investment
- The work teams perform every day
- The people and skills assigned to that work
- The dependencies affecting delivery
- The funding and capacity behind each priority
- The outcomes leaders expect to achieve
Clarity describes what leaders intend. Connectivity determines what the organization actually does.
The context exists, but it’s trapped
The information leaders need is usually already somewhere inside the organization.
Priorities may live in strategy documents. Work lives in delivery tools. Team capacity sits in workforce-planning systems. Funding belongs to finance systems. Dependencies, risks, and decisions are scattered across still more tools, meetings, and conversations.
The problem is not necessarily missing information. It is disconnected information.
The effects of that fragmentation show up throughout the report
| What we found | What it tells us |
| 83% of organizations rely on manual status updates and personal judgment rather than structurally embedded accountability. | Leaders must reconstruct the relationship between strategy and execution. |
| 60% say risks are identified sometimes late, mostly late, or only after impact. | Signals exist, but they do not reach decision-makers soon enough. |
| 72% of leaders identify competing priorities as a chronic overstretch problem for key teams. | Even when priorities are clear, organizations struggle to make the trade-offs needed to focus team capacity on what matters most. |
When an executive asks whether a strategic initiative is on track, the organization often has to assemble the answer from scratch. Teams collect updates, reconcile competing definitions, trace dependencies, and create a temporary executive view.
By the time that view is complete, parts of it may already be out of date.
This makes drift difficult to detect because signals remain trapped below the planning layer.
The evidence is clear: More planning does not close the gap
The natural response is often to introduce another planning cycle, priority review, or reporting requirement.
The research challenges that approach. How frequently an organization re-ranks its priorities has effectively zero predictive relationship with:
- Decision velocity
- Dependency-resolution speed
- AI effectiveness
A revised strategy does not produce a pivot unless that decision reaches the execution layer. If the plan changes while teams, budgets, and systems continue on their existing trajectory, the organization has improved its time to update a document instead of its ability to move.
What happens when strategy and execution are connected
Ben Waddle, VP of Strategy, Planning, Delivery and Product Marketing at Expedia Group, articulated this challenge at Atlassian Team ’26 in Anaheim on May 6, 2026.
Describing how Expedia changed one of its core executive-review processes, Waddle said:
“Our quarterly priority reviews, which historically would take weeks of preparation and reaching out to 50-plus product managers, are now produced on demand using Jira. We hold those meetings out of the tool itself, so the information is as fresh as the moment we walk into the meeting room.”
The important shift is not simply that Expedia produces reports faster. It is that its leaders no longer have to reconstruct a picture of execution before they can discuss it.
The context is already available and current. That changes the purpose of the meeting:
| Before connected context | After |
| Collect status updates | Examine current signals |
| Reconcile conflicting information | Work from shared context |
| Build a picture of execution | Discuss what the picture means |
| Debate whose data is correct | Make decisions and trade-offs |
| Discover drift after it has compounded | Respond while there is still time to act |
This is the practical value of connecting strategic intent to actual work. Leadership attention can move from gathering information to deciding what to do with it.
What is a connected operating model?
Business leaders need an operating model built from the work upward that preserves the context teams generate as they plan, decide, execute, and adapt. That context is earned in the execution layer and connects:
- Priorities: What the organization has chosen to accomplish
- Work: The initiatives, projects, and tasks advancing those priorities
- People and capacity: The teams, skills, and resources available
- Dependencies and risks: The conditions that could accelerate or obstruct progress
- Funding: The capital committed to each strategic bet
- Outcomes: The measurable impact the work is expected to produce
When these elements are connected, leaders can see whether the work happening today is still aligned with the decisions made six months ago. They can identify where capacity is tied up in lower-value initiatives. They can assess the consequences of a change before committing to it, and then see whether resources actually follow the decision.
AI makes this connection even more consequential. The report finds that domain connectivity, not model sophistication, is the strongest predictor of AI effectiveness. Without a connected view of priorities, work, people, and funding, AI may accelerate activity without improving alignment; with it, AI can help surface drift and risk early enough for leaders to act.
How can leaders identify the strategy-execution gap?
Leadership teams can begin by asking three practical questions:
- What percentage of active work is explicitly linked to a current strategic priority in a shared system? If the answer requires a special data request, the connection is probably being managed manually.
- When a strategic priority changes, how long does it take for work, funding, and team capacity to reflect the decision? Measure the time required for resources to move, not merely the time required to approve or document the change.
- Can leaders identify drift without initiating a new reporting exercise? Current alignment, dependencies, risks, and expected outcomes should be visible before the next executive review begins.
These questions move the conversation beyond whether the organization has a strategy. They test whether its operating model can translate that strategy into coordinated action.
Turn strategic intent into organizational movement
Here’s the good news for most organizations: The information required to close that gap already exists in the work, teams, priorities, dependencies, and capital-allocation decisions being made throughout the organization. The opportunity is to connect those elements so leadership can see where execution supports strategic intent, where it is drifting, and what needs to move next.
Organizations that make that connection can replace manually assembled narratives with current evidence. They can surface risks earlier, make trade-offs with greater confidence, and move resources while strategic opportunities are still open.
Read Leading the human + AI enterprise: A new playbook for strategic portfolio management for the complete research behind the Clarity Trap, the structural causes of the strategy-execution gap, and the operating-model changes that can help organizations respond in days rather than quarters.
