Earlier this year the PMI and Agile Alliance introduced the Manifesto for Enterprise Agility. Then came the harder question: why do organizations with great strategies still struggle to execute them? Their answer is a report called Closing the Change Readiness Gap, and in this episode Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith dig into what it found. Executives are confident their purpose is clear, yet the single biggest problem they named was the disconnect between planning and execution. The report points to four obstacles: signal loss, where the why gets stripped out on the way down; decision rights that sit too far from the work; a structural trap where friction hardens into process; and a lack of psychological safety to name any of it. The trio unpack why these are not four separate problems but one connected system, why the frozen middle is really a shock absorber, and why you cannot bolt AI or a framework onto a broken structure and expect flow.
