EVOLVE connects NED’s, board-level talent, senior advisors and fractional executives with growth-stage commerce companies. Our events are one expression of that work.

We host expert sessions, in-person meetups, and small, closed dinners across key global markets. These gatherings are designed to support ongoing conversations, not one-off appearances. Now, onto this week’s newsletter.

This week’s EVOLVE expert session featured Kevin Ertell, former Global Vice President of Retail Stores and Operations at Nike and author of The Strategy Trap.

Kevin has spent decades operating inside large, complex organisations where strategy is abundant and execution remains fragile.

His central observation is not provocative. It is precise.
Most strategies fail even when they are logically sound.

The reason is rarely intellectual. It is organisational.

Kevin’s work focuses on the conditions that make execution possible, or impossible, once decisions move beyond leadership rooms and into daily operations.

The session, enriched by senior operators across retail, platforms, B2B, and infrastructure-heavy businesses, surfaced several insights that are worth pausing on.

What follows is not a recap. It is an attempt to surface what was non-obvious.

A recurring assumption inside large organisations is that execution fails downstream. Teams are blamed for moving too slowly, misinterpreting intent, or resisting change.

What Kevin described, and what many in the room recognised, is that failure often begins much earlier.

Strategy is frequently created in partial isolation. A small group aligns quickly, documents the direction, and moves on. Alignment is assumed. Capacity is assumed. Behavioural impact is assumed.

None of these assumptions tend to hold.

One early signal Kevin highlighted is simple: ask leaders at different levels to articulate the strategy in their own words. In most organisations, even well-run ones, the answers diverge quickly. When that happens, execution issues later are not surprising. The system never converged in the first place.

Several members noted similar experiences. Strategies existed, but only as mental models in a few heads. When asked to show them, nothing concrete appeared. Execution had no shared anchor.

Kevin spoke at length about co-creation, and it was one of the most misunderstood ideas discussed.

Co-creation is often treated as a soft exercise. In practice, Kevin described it as a discipline designed to surface friction early.

The purpose is not agreement.The purpose is exposure.

Bringing in people who will later execute the strategy changes the conversation. Operational limits appear sooner. Unrealistic sequencing becomes visible. Dependencies surface.

One of the strongest examples Kevin shared came from behavioural research rather than business theory. People value what they help build. Not emotionally, but materially. When individuals contribute to shaping a direction, they invest differently in carrying it forward.

Several members connected this to their own environments. Strategies designed without operational voices may appear elegant, but they travel poorly. Those shaped with frontline input may feel slower to produce, but they move faster later.

This surfaced a subtle insight: time spent early is not a delay. It is a reallocation.

Another non-obvious theme was overcommitment.

Most organisations approve more initiatives than they can realistically absorb. This is often framed as ambition or growth mindset. In practice, it creates quiet failure.

Kevin pointed out that many leadership teams treat capacity as elastic. New strategies are layered onto existing operations with phrases like “we’ll figure it out” or “we’ll build while flying”.

This language appeared repeatedly in the session, and it was not used approvingly.

Capacity, Kevin argued, is not an operational detail. It is a strategic constraint. Ignoring it does not make it disappear. It only shifts the cost downstream.

Several operators in the room added colour. In both retail and B2B contexts, initiatives failed less because of resistance and more because people were already saturated. Priorities competed quietly. Trade-offs were never made explicit.

Over time, organisations become busy without becoming effective.Connect with NED, Board Level Talent & SeniorAdvisors today

One of the sharper contributions in the session came from reframing communication failure.

The issue is rarely that leaders do not communicate. It is that they assume repetition equals reinforcement.

Kevin referenced cognitive research showing how quickly people forget information that is not actively reinforced. Strategies announced once, or even a few times, fade rapidly as daily noise takes over.

Effective communication, as Kevin framed it, requires three properties: it arrives early, it cuts through noise, and it continues.

This resonated with members who have built global operations. Announcements do not compete with attention. Context does. People need to understand why conditions are changing before they absorb what is changing.

Without that groundwork, communication becomes a broadcast. Broadcasts do not move systems.

Culture was not treated as a value set or a slogan in this conversation. It appeared as a behavioural system.

Kevin referenced a definition that landed strongly with the group: culture reflects what organisations reward and what they allow to persist. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Several members expanded on this from their own experience. Strategies collapse when incentives reward behaviours that quietly undermine stated goals. Politics emerge where success metrics are unclear or inconsistent.

What was notable here is that culture was framed as an execution amplifier. When expectations, measures, and behaviour align, organisations absorb shocks better. When they don’t, even strong quarters mask fragility.

This reframing moves culture out of HR conversations and into governance.

One of the more candid moments came when a member raised organisational politics.

Kevin did not dismiss it. He contextualised it.

Political behaviour tends to increase where success is poorly defined and incentives are misaligned. People protect themselves in uncertain systems.

Clear measures, consistent expectations, and visible consequences reduce politics more effectively than structural reorganisation.

This was reinforced by analogies from sport. Teams perform when roles are clear and contribution is visible. Organisations behave similarly, though they rarely acknowledge it.

Across the session, one idea kept resurfacing.

Organisations confuse wanting to execute with being ready to execute.

Strategies are approved with optimism. The conditions required to carry them are assumed. When outcomes disappoint, effort increases rather than reflection.

Kevin’s work, and the experience shared by your members, suggests the opposite response is needed.

Slow earlier. Validate harder. Reduce scope. Align incentives. Build capacity deliberately.

None of these are inspirational moves. All of them are operational.

Markets are less forgiving than they were a decade ago. Margin for error is thinner. Execution gaps surface faster.

In this environment, strategy quality matters less than execution conditions.

The lesson from this session is not that organisations need better ideas. It is that they need to take execution seriously as a system.

That requires humility, restraint, and a willingness to surface uncomfortable constraints early.

Those are not popular leadership traits. They are effective ones.

What this session reinforced is that execution does not fail dramatically.
It fails quietly, through assumptions left untested and limits left unspoken.

Most organisations do not lack strategy.
They lack the conditions that allow strategy to travel.

That gap only becomes visible when leaders slow down enough to examine how decisions are absorbed, where capacity is consumed, and which behaviours are tolerated.

This conversation with Kevin Ertell surfaced those dynamics clearly.
Not as theory, but as patterns seen repeatedly inside complex organisations.

For leaders responsible for turning intent into outcomes, these are questions worth sitting with.

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