James Watt didn’t walk into a room full of mine owners and explain bore, stroke, and pressure. He didn’t ask them to become engineers before they could recognize value. He translated the unfamiliar into something they already understood — how many horses this machine could replace.
Most organizations communicate strategy the way engineers describe engines. Pillars. Priorities. Capabilities. Language that sounds aligned in a presentation and means six different things by Monday morning. They explain the mechanism, but they forget the meaning.
And so people do what people always do when they’re handed something they can’t interpret: they fill in the blanks themselves. Marketing fills it one way. Operations fills it another. Sales is operating on a third version entirely. Everyone thinks they’re aligned because they’re using the same words.
But shared language is not shared understanding. And that gap — that quiet, compounding space between what leadership intended and what the organization actually does — is where execution drift begins.
The cost of confusion doesn’t show up immediately. It accumulates — in fragmented priorities, duplicated efforts, decisions made without a common logic, and eventually, in people who quietly stop trying to figure out what the strategy actually means for their work. That’s not a strategy problem. That’s a translation problem.
What Watt Actually Did
Watt gave mine owners a mental shortcut. He didn’t ask them to learn an entirely new system before they could act. He met them in a frame they already understood — and used that frame to shift how they saw the opportunity. That’s strategic reframing. And it’s exactly what most organizations skip.
Not dumbing the strategy down. Making it translatable. Giving people a usable logic for connecting the strategy to the choices sitting in front of them every day — without waiting for clarification that may never come, without escalating every ambiguous decision, without needing to think like the CEO to know what to do next.
This is what a Steering Guide does. It turns strategic intent into a shared decision-making framework. It answers not just what we’re trying to do, but how we think, what we prioritize, and how we behave when no one’s watching.
The organizations that execute well aren’t always the ones with the most sophisticated strategy. They’re the ones that make their strategy understandable enough, concrete enough, and consistent enough for people to act on it — not just once, in a kickoff meeting, but every day, in every decision.
Watt didn’t win adoption because his buyers became engineers. He won because he made technical value feel relevant to the people who needed to act on it. That’s the job of leadership. Not just to build the strategy, but to make it legible to the people who have to live it and activate it.
People don’t execute what they can’t translate. And in most organizations, it’s a reframing problem that’s been mistaken for a people problem for far too long.
About the Author
Trained as an organizational behavioral scientist and customer-centricity expert, Andrea Belk Olson helps companies operationalize corporate strategy through transforming mindsets and behaviors. She is the author of three business books, including her most recent, What To Ask: How To Learn What Customers Need but Don’t Tell You.
She is a 4x ADDY award winner and contributing writer to Entrepreneur Magazine, Harvard Business Review, INC Magazine, World Economic Forum, and more. Andrea is also an applied entrepreneurship instructor at the University of Iowa and TEDx speaker coach.
