The New Evidence on Strategy Execution (Q4 2025): What 5 Fresh Datasets Really Say About Why Strategies Stalls, and How Leaders Pull Away

Senior strategy leaders don’t need another “execution is hard” think-piece. You need to know what’s actually true in the data right now, and how the picture has shifted over the last few months.

Across five major research efforts in 2025, Planview, ClearPoint Strategy, Cascade, AchieveIt, and BCG, a consistent story is emerging:

Strategy failure is no longer a mystery. It’s measurable, patterned, and increasingly concentrated in a few systemic breakdowns: portfolio overload, missing ownership, misaligned rhythms, and shallow AI adoption.

This briefing pulls those findings together into one narrative. Not just to recap each report, but to show how they triangulate into a clear agenda for CSOs and strategy heads.

1. The Execution Gap Is Worse Than Most Boards Realise

ClearPoint’s dataset is the cold shower.

• They analysed 20,582 real strategic plans and 31.2 million data points across seven industries.

• Result: only 12.5% of strategic projects are ever completed; 84.5% fail to reach completion. ClearPoint Strategy

• Over 83% of organisations sit in the “very low performer” bucket, completing less than 25% of their projects. ClearPoint Strategy
  

This isn’t a perception survey. It’s actual execution data pulled from live strategy-management systems. It quantifies what most leadership teams only feel anecdotally.

Cascade’s “State of Strategy 2025” then shows what this looks like from the top:

• 79% of organisations say they lack effective strategy reporting.

• 80% of teams aren’t aligned on what really matters.

• 70% of leaders say strategy is not embedded in daily operations.

• Only 3.55% of companies reach “true execution maturity”. Cascade
  

Put ClearPoint and Cascade together and you get a stark picture:

Most enterprises are running large, noisy portfolios with poor reporting, unclear alignment, and minimal completion, while leaders vastly overestimate how “on track” they are.

For a board, that’s not an abstract risk. It’s a structurally mis-specified operating model for strategy.

2. Leaders Aren’t Just Faster – They’re Systematically More Balanced

The Planview 2025 State of Strategy Execution Benchmark reframes the conversation away from simple “speed vs control”.

They surveyed over 800 leaders responsible for strategy and execution at large organisations globally, then clustered them into Leaders, Challengers, and Laggards based on how well and how fast they adapt to change. Planview

Key findings:

• Only 28% of organisations now say they can “adapt quickly to change”, down from 40% in 2021, even though they are executing faster. Planview

• Leaders exceed their revenue goals by 12.1%, while laggards fall short. Planview

• Leaders are about 1.5× more likely to hit their strategic goals and are 9.5× more likely than laggards to adapt fast. LinkedIn

What separates them?

Planview’s analysis points to a balance of speed, adaptability, and governance across five execution competencies:

1. Pivoting strategies and plans

2. Reallocating funding and budgets

3. Reprioritising work

4. Realigning people and teams

5. Accessing and analysing data for decisions Planview
   

Leaders aren’t just “moving faster”. They’ve industrialised adaptability, building repeatable rhythms of review, reallocation, and decision-making, without losing control.

The execution gap is no longer about ambition or ideas. It’s the gap between one-off heroics under pressureand systematic adaptability under normal conditions.

3. Portfolio Design + Ownership: The Hidden Mechanical Failures

The most useful contribution from ClearPoint is not that lots of projects fail, it’s why.

From their 20k+ plan dataset: ClearPoint

• The median number of projects in portfolios rose 60% (from 5 in 2017 to 8 in 2024).

• Plans with fewer than 20 “elements” (goals, projects, measures, milestones) are far more likely to be high performers (68% high-performer rate).

• Portfolio complexity correlates directly with failure: as plans grow beyond 40–60 elements, completion rates collapse into single digits.

They also expose an ownership crisis:

• 74% of strategic goals lack owners.

• 71% of measures and 57% of projects have no clear ownership.

• Even where owners exist, 86% are “phantom owners” (no updates in 90+ days). ClearPoint

AchieveIt’s State of Strategy Execution 2025, based on a survey of 250+ leaders, confirms this from the perception side:

• 81% say unclear accountability causes delays in execution.

• 95% of leaders see improved plan completion when there is clear accountability.

• 49% say they don’t have the right tools to measure strategic plans effectively. AchieveIt

The cross-study insight:

• Most organisations are trying to execute too many things, with too few true owners, tracked in tools that were never designed for execution.

For senior strategy leaders, this suggests a very specific design problem:

• Right-size the portfolio (ClearPoint’s data points to ideal ranges of 5–9 strategic goals, 5–8 active projects, and 15–20 milestones). ClearPoint

• Assign real owners and track owner activity, not just RACI charts.

• Treat the absence of ownership as a structural risk, not an HR detail.

4. Rhythm and Review: The Critical Variable Most Teams Underestimate

Three of the studies converge on one subtle but crucial factor: cadence.

• ClearPoint shows that high performers run execution cycles of ~13.7 months, versus 34 months for low performers. ClearPoint

• AchieveIt finds that 82% of organisations that evaluate their strategic plans annually report increased goal achievement; 66% of leaders believe consistent updates significantly raise the odds of hitting growth targets. AchieveIt

• Planview highlights that leaders move away from annual planning towards quarterly (or even monthly) strategy reviews, treating strategy as a “dynamic GPS” rather than a static roadmap. Planview

Combine those and a pattern emerges:

It’s not just whether you track progress, it’s how often you are willing to re-decide.

Most organisations:

• Front-load planning in Q4/Q1,

• Clog calendars with December and June deadlines (ClearPoint: 28% of initiative deadlines land in December; 18% in June), ClearPoint

• Then run for months on outdated assumptions.

High performers build shorter, tighter feedback loops:

• Strategy and portfolio reviews at least quarterly

• Resource reallocation and reprioritisation integrated into those reviews

• Metrics that are clearly tied to a small number of goals, not a sprawling KPI graveyard

The takeaway for CSOs: your review rhythm is now as much a strategic design choice as your market positioning.

5. AI: The New Execution Divide, Not Just a Tech Trend

The BCG “Widening AI Value Gap” report (Build for the Future 2025) is technically about AI, but strategically, it’s about execution discipline.

From a survey of 1,250 companies:

• Only 5% of firms are “future-built” and consistently generating significant AI value.

• Around 35% are scaling AI but not yet seeing major impact.

• A full 60% report little to no value from AI, despite heavy investment.

The payoff for the leaders is material:

• They achieve around 1.7× revenue growth, 3.6× greater total shareholder return, and higher EBIT margins versus peers. OpenAI CDN

• They already allocate 15% of AI budgets to agentic AI, which accounts for about 17% of AI value today and is expected to reach 29% by 2028. media-publications.bcg.com

Crucially, BCG’s own commentary is explicit: this is not a tech problem; it’s a strategy and operating-model problem. Leaders:

• Have clear AI-linked strategic outcomes

• Redesign workflows around AI, rather than “bolting AI onto legacy processes”

• Reinvest AI gains into talent, data, and governance

Planview’s benchmark reinforces this: in their data, execution leaders are 8× more likely to use AI across multiple use cases (risk identification, resource allocation, reporting). 

Viewed alongside the broader execution studies, AI is not an isolated topic:

AI has become a multiplier on existing execution capability. If your execution system is weak, AI amplifies waste. If it’s strong, AI compounds advantage.

For strategy leaders, the question shifts from “What’s our AI strategy?” to “Is our strategy-execution system mature enough to absorb AI at scale?”

6. Putting It Together: What This Means for Senior Strategy Leaders

Taken together, these research pieces do more than confirm that “execution is hard”. They outline a coherent redesign agenda.

Here’s the synthesis you won’t get from reading them individually:

1. Right-size the strategy portfolio.

   • ClearPoint’s data shows that overstuffed plans kill completion; high performers run lean portfolios with single-digit goals and a small set of active projects. ClearPoint

   • Cascade’s numbers on low execution maturity suggest most companies believe they’re focused while actually running bloated portfolios. Cascade

2. Rebuild ownership and accountability as first-class design elements.

   • The combination of ClearPoint’s ownership stats and AchieveIt’s accountability findings basically says: if there is no active, visible owner, the initiative doesn’t exist – regardless of what the plan says. ClearPoint | AchieveIt

3. Shorten execution cycles and institutionalise review.

   • Planview’s leaders have normalised quarterly (or faster) review and adjustment; ClearPoint shows high performers compress execution cycles by 60%+. Planview

   • This is no longer an “agile thing”; it’s a mainstream strategy-execution requirement.

4. Treat AI as an execution capability, not a standalone strategy.

   • BCG’s 5% “future-built” companies are effectively strategy-execution leaders who happen to use AI, not AI hobbyists who happen to have a strategy deck. BCG

   • Planview’s data suggests that execution leaders are already using AI to solve exactly the problems highlighted in AchieveIt, Cascade, and ClearPoint: prioritisation, resource allocation, risk, reporting. Planview

5. Upgrade measurement from “activity tracking” to “execution health”.

   • Cascade’s reporting gap (79% lack effective strategy reporting) and ClearPoint’s insights on phantom owners both point to the same flaw: most reporting is activity-based, not execution-health-based. Cascade

Questions to Take to Your Next Exec/Board Session

You don’t need to quote all these stats in the boardroom. You can use them to sharpen the discussion:

1. Portfolio:

   • “If ClearPoint’s median is 8 projects but high performers run 5–8 active projects, how many are we actually running, and what should our target be?”

2. Ownership:

   • “If 74% of goals in the dataset have no owner, where are we on that spectrum? Can we show named, active owners for every strategic goal?”

3. Rhythm:

   • “What is our true execution cycle time, from decision to measurable impact, and how does that compare to the 13.7- vs 34-month gap ClearPoint sees?”

4. AI as multiplier:

   • “Are we in BCG’s 5%, 35%, or 60% bucket, and what would need to change in our execution system for AI to actually move revenue, margin, or cost?”

5. Reporting:

   • “If 79% of organisations lack effective strategy reporting, how confident are we that our dashboards are giving us a true view of execution health?”