The Strategic Illusion: Why Strategy Breaks Between Intent and Execution

Organizations routinely produce every component of a strategy, yet these components rarely behave as a coherent system. Grounded in more than two decades of practice in program recovery and organization design, this paper develops a model of nine layers in three bands (Intent, Translation, and Operational Reality) held together by vertical principles and routed feedback loops. It introduces six testable propositions, illustrates them with a longitudinal case study, and specifies a dual-governance mechanism (UDS²A vs OODA) for structural adaptation.