Three findings from a recent Harvard Business Review piece ‘What Really Gets in the Way of Change’ reveal that the barriers to growth, competitive advantage, and leading at pace are not structural, technological, or financial. They are leadership and cultural failures. And the capability required to overcome them is hiding in plain sight.
Ask most senior leaders what they want from their organisation in the next three to five years and you will hear the same answers. Growth. Competitive advantage. The ability to move faster. The capacity to differentiate in markets where differentiation is increasingly hard to sustain. The need to lead — not react — in an environment changing faster than most strategies can keep up with.
What you will rarely hear is the word innovation.
That is not because innovation is irrelevant. It is because for some, the word has become difficult to define, or the word has become so loaded — so associated with Silicon Valley mythology, skunkworks labs, and initiatives that cost a great deal and deliver very little — that many senior leaders have quietly stopped using it. And yet the outcomes they are chasing: growth, differentiation, pace, competitive resilience — cannot be achieved without the underlying organisational capability that the word describes.
Innovation, stripped of its baggage, is simply the repeatable ability of an organisation to create new value: new approaches to old problems, new models that outpace competitors, new thinking that opens markets, and new leadership behaviours that make all of the above possible. It is not an event. It is not a team. It is not a programme. It is a capability — and it is the one capability that sits beneath every strategic ambition most leadership teams are currently failing to deliver on.
“The outcomes most CEOs are chasing — growth, pace, differentiation — cannot be achieved without the underlying capability that makes them possible. Call it what you like. The organisations that build it will win. The ones that don’t will be managed into irrelevance.”
A recent edition of HBR’s ‘The Insider’ newsletter, brilliantly curated by managing editor Gretchen Gavett, highlights three findings from new research that are directly relevant to any senior leader trying to drive growth and build organisations capable of competing at pace. Each finding points at a different failure mode. All three point to the same root cause.
1. The Alignment Illusion — Why Growth Initiatives Keep Stalling
The first research finding is both simple and devastating: most change initiatives fail not because of poor execution, but because the executive team never actually agreed on what they were doing or why. Leadership teams mistake polite consensus in a room for genuine strategic alignment. They leave the meeting believing they are unified. They return to their respective functions and make decisions that are, in practice, completely inconsistent with each other.
If you’ve watched a growth strategy lose momentum before it reached the frontline, this will sound familiar.
The failure is not one of communication or cascading. It is one of honest leadership. Building the capacity to grow at pace, to differentiate, and to outcompete requires an executive team that has done the hard work of genuine alignment: not on the aspirational headline, but on the specifics. What are we actually willing to change? What resources are we genuinely committing? How much risk are we truly comfortable with? What does failure look like, and are we prepared to tolerate it in pursuit of the goal?
“Polite consensus in the boardroom produces contradictory signals in the organisation. People below the leadership team are not stupid — they wait to see what leaders actually do before they decide whether the strategy is real.”
In my experience of working with leadership teams across sectors and continents, the gap between what is agreed in the boardroom and what is demonstrated in the day-to-day decisions of each leader is where most growth agendas die. Middle managers — the people who must translate strategic intent into operational reality — cannot drive change forward when the signals from above are inconsistent. So they do not. They wait, and they hedge. They protect what is already working rather than risking it on a strategy they are not sure the leadership team actually believes in.
For CEOs, the question this research demands is an uncomfortable one: does your leadership team genuinely agree on what it will take to grow, differentiate, and lead at pace — or have you assumed consensus from silence? The answer will determine whether your next growth initiative succeeds or quietly disappears into the organisation like every other one before it.
For HR Directors and CHROs, this is not someone else’s problem. Culture is the lived experience of what leadership does, not what it says. When the signals from the top are mixed, the culture learns to distrust commitment. Psychological safety — the foundation of any high-performing, adaptive organisation — erodes when people cannot trust that leadership means what it says. Rebuilding that trust after repeated false starts requires more than a new initiative. It requires demonstrable, consistent change in leadership behaviour over time.
2. The Convergence Trap — When the Technology Designed to Differentiate You Does the Opposite
The second finding should concern every senior leader who’s jumped on the bandwagon of positioning AI as their primary lever for competitive advantage. Research highlighted in the HBR piece identifies what is being called the ‘agentic convergence trap’: when competing organisations each deploy similar AI tools, they unwittingly learn their way toward identical strategies. The competitive edge they expected the technology to create quietly disappears as the tools homogenise their thinking, their outputs, and ultimately their direction.
This is the strategic risk hiding inside most organisations’ AI investment narratives — and from what I’m experiencing, almost no one is talking about it at board level.
AI is a powerful and genuinely transformative technology. But it is an amplifier, not a strategy. Deployed effectively in an organisation that already has strong differentiated thinking, strong adaptive leadership, and strong problem-solving capability, it accelerates all of those things. Deployed in an organisation that lacks those foundations, it creates the perception of differentiation, but in reality, simply makes the organisation more efficient at doing what it has always done. And if every competitor is doing the same thing with the same tools, efficiency is not differentiation.
“Technology deployed in the absence of new thinking does not create competitive advantage. It creates competitive parity. And parity is not a growth strategy — it is the slow path to irrelevance.”
The organisations that will sustain genuine competitive advantage through this period are those that bring something technology cannot replicate: the distinctly human capability to ask questions the algorithm has not been trained to ask, to pursue opportunities that do not yet show up in a data set, and to challenge the assumptions that every competitor is making. That capability requires people who think differently. It requires leaders who actively seek out perspectives that challenge their own. It requires a culture that rewards curiosity and the courage to explore, rather than defaulting to the safe, data-validated, consensus-approved answer.
None of that comes from a technology investment. It comes from building the right leadership behaviours, the right culture, and the right organisational conditions — the very things the first research finding suggests most executive teams have not yet aligned on.
For CEOs, the question to solve is this: in a world where your competitors have access to the same technology, the same data, and the same AI models, what is the source of your sustainable competitive advantage? If the honest answer is ‘we haven’t defined it yet,’ then that is the strategic conversation that needs to happen before the next technology investment decision.
3. Leading at Pace — The Empowerment Architecture Most Organisations Get Wrong
The third finding addresses something I hear from almost every CEO I work with: the need to move faster. To lead at pace. To make better decisions more quickly, closer to where the customer and the market actually are — without losing strategic coherence or organisational control.
The research proposes what it calls ‘structured empowerment’ as the answer: a middle path between the paralysis of centralised decision-making and the incoherence of full decentralisation. Rather than swinging between control and chaos, it gives people at the frontline genuine choices within a clear strategic framework.
This is exactly right. And the reason most organisations fail to achieve it is not that the concept is complex. It is that they have never defined the architecture that makes it work in practice.
“Leading at pace does not mean removing control. It means knowing precisely where each decision belongs in the organisation — and building the culture, capability, and trust to support it at every level.”
In the work I do with organisations around the world, I use a framework that maps directly to this challenge. It defines three distinct but interdependent roles that must function in concert if an organisation is to grow and move at the pace the market now demands. At its core, it recognises that the capability to grow, differentiate, and lead at pace cannot reside in one function or one layer of an organisation. It must be owned, driven, and contributed to across all three.
The first role belongs to senior leaders. In my ‘ODC’ framework, this is the Own layer. Leaders do not merely endorse the growth agenda — they own it. That means making the strategic commitments explicit, allocating real resources, modelling the risk tolerance and behavioural change the organisation needs to see, and maintaining visible, consistent alignment on where the organisation is going and why. Without that ownership, nothing below it can move with confidence or pace.
The second role belongs to the management layer — the people between the boardroom and the frontline. In my framework, this is the Drive layer, and it is consistently the most under-leveraged resource in most organisations. In the vast majority of organisations I work with, managers are treated as administrators of process rather than drivers of performance and capability. Yet they are the people who determine, in practice, whether a growth strategy is real or theoretical. They are the bridge between what leadership commits to and what the organisation actually does. When they are equipped, genuinely empowered, and actively developed for this role, they translate strategic intent into the pace of action the organisation needs. When they are not, they become the ceiling through which no amount of strategic ambition can pass.
The third role belongs to the frontline. In my framework, this is the Contribute layer. The people closest to customers, processes, and operational reality hold the most current and actionable intelligence in any organisation. Structured empowerment — giving those people genuine authority over defined decisions, real options to act within a strategic framework, and credible protection when things do not go to plan — is how organisations unlock that intelligence and turn it into competitive advantage. Without it, the best ideas, the fastest insights, and the most valuable signals from the market stay trapped at the frontline and never reach the people who need to act on them.
The Own–Drive–Contribute model is deceptively simple. What makes it powerful is the clarity it forces at every level: not just what each layer should do, but what each layer must be enabled to do by the layer above it. Senior leaders who genuinely own the agenda create the conditions for managers to drive it. Managers who genuinely drive it create the conditions for frontline people to contribute to it. Break the chain at any point and pace collapses.
For HR Directors and CHROs, this has direct consequences for every people system in the organisation. Performance frameworks that punish failure cannot co-exist with a leadership model that asks people to move fast and try new approaches. Reward structures that reinforce compliance cannot support a culture that needs courage and curiosity. Learning and development programmes built for yesterday’s operating model cannot equip people for the pace the business requires. These are not peripheral HR issues. They are strategic constraints on the organisation’s capacity to grow.
The Capability That Ties It All Together
Three different research findings. Three different failure modes. One common thread.
Whether the conversation in your organisation is about growth, competitive advantage, differentiation, or the need to lead and move at pace — the capability required to deliver any of those outcomes is the same. It is the ability of your organisation to consistently develop and apply new thinking, new approaches, and new solutions. To adapt faster than the competition. To create value that your customers could not have anticipated and your competitors cannot immediately replicate.
You can call that capability whatever you like. You can frame it as growth capability, adaptive leadership, or organisational agility. Many organisations find those terms easier to work with than the word innovation. Why? Because it’s a word that has been overloaded with unrealistic expectations and underdelivered results.
But whatever you call it, building it requires the same things the research points to: genuine alignment at the leadership level on what the organisation is trying to achieve and what it is prepared to do differently; a clear-eyed view of where sustainable competitive advantage actually comes from in a world where technology is rapidly commoditising thinking; and a deliberate architecture for how decisions get made, how people get empowered, and how pace is sustained without sacrificing coherence.
“The word is less important than the work. Growth, differentiation, and the ability to lead at pace are all effects — outcomes that organisations earn when they build the underlying capability to think and act differently at every level, consistently, over time.”
The organisations that get this right will not just change more effectively. They will use the capacity to change as a competitive weapon. Those that do not will continue to announce strategies that stall, deploy technologies that converge, and wonder why they keep moving slower than the market demands.
The answers are in the research. The capability is buildable. The question is whether you and your leadership team have the genuine alignment — and the honest conversation — to start.
About the Author
Cris Beswick is a globally recognised strategic adviser on growth, leadership, and the organisational capabilities that drive competitive advantage. A former CEO, serial entrepreneur, board adviser, and keynote speaker, he has spent over two decades working with Fortune 500 companies, governments, and leadership teams worldwide. He is co-author of Building a Culture of Innovation and advises senior leaders on building the cultures, capabilities, and leadership behaviours required for sustained growth and differentiation.