Do you know what strategy your people are actually executing?
Not the strategy your board approved. Not the one on the slide deck from the last offsite. The strategy that is playing out, right now, in the priorities your teams are setting for themselves, in the trade-offs your line managers are making every week between operational demands and change initiatives.
In the organizations I have worked with, that question tends to produce a long silence. Leadership teams usually know what strategy they intended. What they rarely know is what strategy has actually taken root on the ground. The distance between those two things — intended strategy and emergent strategy — is what I call the Meaning Gap. And its consequences, when you look at the full scale, are staggering.
The inclusion failure behind the communication problem
The conventional diagnosis frames the Meaning Gap as a communication problem. Leadership has a strategy, people do not understand it, so the answer is better communication — more town halls, clearer messaging, another cascade through the management layers.
This diagnosis misses the deeper issue. In most cases, the gap is not caused by a failure to tell people what the strategy is. The gap is caused by a failure to ask people what they are actually doing and why.
Consider the global implications. The International Labour Organization estimates roughly 3.3 billion people in the world's workforce. In a significant share of organizations, those people show up, work hard, and deliver outputs that may or may not connect to what the organization is trying to accomplish. They are not asked what they think the priorities should be. They are not given a structured way to surface concerns about operational overload, unclear direction, or competing demands. They are told what to execute, and the telling is treated as sufficient.
The waste this generates is enormous. Not just in individual companies, but across entire economies. Products that miss the mark because the people closest to the customer were never asked what they were seeing. Transformation programs that stall because middle managers, overwhelmed by operational demands, had no channel to say so. Strategic pivots that fail because leadership made decisions based on curated reports rather than ground truth from the people doing the work. When organizations treat people as execution units rather than strategic participants, the loss of human potential compounds at a scale that is difficult to overstate.
Shared meaning comes from contribution, not communication
There is a concept worth naming carefully here: Shared Meaning (Jaettu merkitys).
Shared Meaning is distinct from alignment. Alignment is structural — it organizes people, processes, and resources toward a common direction. Shared Meaning is cognitive and motivational. Shared Meaning is about whether people genuinely understand why the organization is heading in a particular direction, and whether they feel their perspective has been part of shaping that understanding.
Here is the critical insight: Shared Meaning cannot be communicated into existence. It has to be co-created.
Karl Weick's research on organizational sensemaking explains why. Meaning, as Weick demonstrated, is not transmitted from leadership like a signal that employees receive. Meaning is actively constructed by each person as they interpret their work, their context, and the signals around them. When people are only told what the strategy is, they construct meaning from whatever is locally available — their immediate tasks, their team, their manager's priorities. The strategy becomes something that exists at a distance, in a document they may have read once.
But when people are asked to articulate their own objectives — what they plan to work on, what challenges they face, what they believe matters most in the coming period — something fundamentally different happens. The act of contributing creates ownership. And the aggregation of those contributions creates something leadership desperately needs: a live, honest picture of what strategy the organization is actually executing.
What emerges when you ask
When organizations give line managers a structured, continuous process to share their objectives and challenges, two things tend to emerge.
First, strategic ground truth. Leadership can read directly from the objectives people set for themselves what strategy is actually being pursued on the ground. Not the intended strategy, but the realized one. This is Mintzberg's emergent strategy made visible — not through after-the-fact analysis, but through a live feed of organizational intent. Where objectives cluster reveals where energy is actually flowing. Where objectives are absent reveals strategic priorities that exist on paper but have not translated into work.
Second, and equally important, the process itself generates Shared Meaning. William Kahn's foundational research on engagement described the conditions under which people bring their full selves to work — psychological safety, availability, and meaningfulness. When people are asked to contribute their perspective, and that contribution is taken seriously, all three conditions are strengthened. The meaningfulness does not come from being told why the work matters. It comes from being treated as someone whose judgment about priorities is worth hearing.
This distinction matters deeply. Organizations that ask people what they are working on, and genuinely incorporate what they learn, create meaning. Organizations that tell people what to work on, however clearly and consistently, create compliance. Compliance looks like execution. But compliance lacks the adaptive judgment that real strategic progress requires.
The leadership response that matters
When bottom-up objectives reveal a gap between intended strategy and emergent strategy, there is a tempting leadership response: recommunicate. Say the same thing more clearly, more frequently, through more channels.
That response, in my experience, tends to deepen the Meaning Gap rather than close it. It signals that leadership already has the answer and simply needs people to receive it better.
The more effective response is to treat what emerges from the bottom up with genuine respect. If line managers across the organization are setting objectives that diverge from the stated strategy, that divergence is information. Perhaps the strategy has not adequately accounted for operational realities. Perhaps certain priorities are unrealistic given current capacity. Perhaps the market has shifted and the people closest to the work have adapted before leadership has.
In each of these cases, the appropriate leadership response is not to communicate louder. It is to do something differently.
When behavior changes, strategy moves
There is a useful way to sharpen the relationship between meaning and impact: real strategic progress does not happen when tasks are completed. It happens when people change their behavior (Kayttaytymismuutos arvona — Behavior Change as Value).
A strategy built on customer-centricity requires people to behave differently in customer interactions. A strategy premised on innovation requires people to respond differently to risk and failure. A strategy that depends on cross-functional speed requires people to prioritize and communicate differently across team boundaries.
None of these behavioral shifts happen because someone read a strategy document. They happen when people understand, from their own experience and contribution, what the strategy is actually asking of them. Shared Meaning — built through participation, not communication — is the condition under which behavior changes durably, rather than reverting once leadership attention moves on.
Without that foundation, training programs produce knowledge that does not transfer to daily decisions. Strategy reviews generate documentation that does not change how people operate. The organization invests in change and gets, at best, temporary compliance.
Three questions worth sitting with
If you want to gauge the Meaning Gap in your organization, these questions may be more revealing than a survey.
First: if you asked every line manager to share their top three objectives for the next quarter, how closely would those objectives map to your strategic priorities? Not what they would say if shown the strategy first — what they would say unprompted, from their own understanding of what matters.
Second: when was the last time your leadership team changed a strategic decision based on what emerged from the organization, rather than from the executive team or the board? If the information flow is only top-down, Shared Meaning is structurally impossible.
Third: do your people have a live, continuous channel to surface what they are working on and what is getting in the way? Not an annual engagement survey. Not a quarterly review. A persistent process where their voice is part of how the organization understands itself.
The Meaning Gap is, at its core, a design problem. Not a design problem in communication, but in participation. Organizations that ask, listen, and adapt based on what they hear tend to build the kind of shared understanding that makes strategy move. Organizations that only tell, however eloquently, tend to wonder why execution never quite matches intent.
The question is whether your organization is designed to hear what your people already know.