Editor’s Note On June 18th, Chris McChesney and Scott Thele, the brains behind the classic 4 Disciplines of Execution will spend 90 minutes with a group of CEOs in a live working session built around tackline the execution challenges defining 2026. Everyone who registers receives the 2026 Execution Playbook—a pre-work tool designed to be worked through with a leadership team—before the event. Come with your real situation. Leave with a plan. Join us >
Before you read another word about execution, try this.
Ask every member of your leadership team—separately, before they can compare notes—what the one result that matters most to your business right now is. Write down what you think they’ll say. Then collect the answers.
If you’ve never done this exercise before, the results will be uncomfortable. In most organizations, according to Chris McChesney and Scott Thele—who have worked with over 4,500 leadership teams as co-creators of the 4 Disciplines of Execution—the answers don’t match. Not to yours. Not to each others’. Not even close. And that misalignment, more than any tariff shock or market disruption or AI anxiety, is what’s actually killing execution.
Want to get on track? Here are six more questions worth asking. They won’t take long. But they’ll tell you more about the health of your organization’s execution than your last quarterly review.
1. Look at your calendar for the past two weeks. What percentage of your time was spent running the business versus working on it?
Be honest. Most CEOs, when they do this exercise, find the ratio deeply uncomfortable—and not in the direction they expected. The whirlwind of day-to-day operations—customer issues, team problems, the endless cascade of urgent decisions—consumes roughly 80 percent of all organizational energy. That’s not a failure. That’s reality. The business has to run.
The problem is when that 80 percent quietly becomes 95. Or 100. When reacting to the present crowds out any work on the future. One CEO described it to McChesney this way: “We’ve been reacting for so long, I fear it started to penetrate the culture—and we think that’s our job.”
When that happens—when running the business and improving it stop feeling like two different jobs—the improvement effort always loses. Not dramatically. Quietly. Which brings us to the next question.
2. Think of the last initiative that mattered. Did it die all at once—or was it slowly suffocated?
McChesney poses this question to leadership teams constantly. The response is nearly unanimous—96 to 100 percent of the room, every time—that the initiative went down slowly and quietly, not all at once.
What killed it wasn’t resistance. It wasn’t a bad strategy. It wasn’t the wrong people. It was busy. Weeks went by with everyone in agreement, everyone committed and nothing actually moving. The initiative wasn’t protected from the whirlwind. It was consumed by it.
This is the diagnosis. The question that follows is the harder one.
3. What’s left when you subtract what the whirlwind is already handling—and what you could resolve with a single decision?
Most leadership teams skip straight to choosing priorities. McChesney and Thele argue that’s the wrong starting point. Before you choose what deserves disproportionate focus, eliminate what’s already covered.
What results are already coming from running the business day to day? What could you resolve with a decision alone—a hire, a contract, a capital allocation—without requiring your team to change behavior? Strip those out. What’s left after both subtractions is where your real breakthrough goal lives.
This remainder is usually smaller and more specific than people expect. Which is the point. “Strategy doesn’t mean big,” McChesney says. “Strategy means choice.”
4. Can you write your most important goal in one sentence—from X to Y by when?
Not a theme. Not a direction. One specific, measurable result with a deadline.
“Improve customer retention” is not a breakthrough goal. “Increase renewal rate from 74 percent to 85 percent by Q3” is. The difference isn’t just semantic. The first gives your team nothing to act on. The second gives them a finish line they can see from where they’re standing.
If you can’t write your most important goal that way—one metric, one sentence, one deadline—you haven’t found it yet. And here’s the test that makes it concrete: if you put this goal in front of your frontline team right now, would they know what to do on Monday morning? If not, it’s still too big. Keep narrowing.
5. Where is AI adding to your team’s whirlwind rather than reducing it?
This is the question most leadership teams aren’t asking—and should be. The instinct when it comes to AI is to lead with the technology: What tools should we be using, how do we do more AI, where are we falling behind? That instinct, Thele argues, is exactly backwards. “AI without clarity is a liability,” he says.
The evidence is showing up everywhere: teams spending more time evaluating tools than using them, information explosions that demand attention without deserving it, role confusion about who does what as AI blurs organizational lines.
The teams pulling ahead aren’t the ones with the most AI initiatives. They’re the ones who started with a specific breakthrough goal and then asked: What results are now on the table that weren’t before? Narrow the focus first. Let the goal determine where AI goes to work—not the other way around.
6. Does your team have a weekly meeting that’s about commitments—not status updates?
This is the question that separates organizations that execute from those that intend to. A cadence of accountability—a brief weekly meeting where every team member commits to the one or two things they’ll do this week to move the breakthrough goal—is the mechanism that turns clarity into results. Without it, even the best-defined goal drifts.
The distinction matters: A status update reports what happened. A commitment declares what will happen. One is passive. The other is a contract with the team.
McChesney puts the failure mode plainly. Too many leaders, he says, make a declaration and move on—never following up, never tracking, never holding anyone including themselves to what was said.
“The edge,” Thele says, “belongs to whoever has an execution system more persistent than the disruption.”
