The Internal Purpose Problem: Why Your Strategy Fails Before It Reaches the Market

By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy

Here’s a pattern I see play out with almost every organization I work with: the strategy looks good on paper. The vision is polished. The mission statement reads well on the website. The growth targets are ambitious and the board is satisfied.

And then nothing. It just kind of sits there.

Not because the external strategy was wrong. Not because the market shifted or the competition got smarter. It falls apart because the people inside the organization—the ones responsible for executing that strategy—never actually connected to it. They didn’t feel it. They didn’t believe in it. In many cases, they didn’t even know what it was.

Less than 5% of employees have a basic understanding of their company’s strategy. Think about that. You can’t execute what you don’t understand, and you certainly won’t fight for something you’ve never been invited into.

This is a silent killer of strategic performance.

The Outside-In Trap

Most strategic planning starts in the wrong place. It starts with the market. With competitors. With revenue projections and shareholder expectations. It builds from the outside in—defining what the organization will do before it ever addresses what the organization is or why anyone inside it should care.

Simon Sinek made this point years ago in Start With Why, and it’s still one of the most widely cited and least consistently applied ideas in business. Sinek argued that organizations inspire action not by explaining what they do, but by communicating why they exist. His Golden Circle model places purpose at the center, with every product, service, and strategy radiating outward from that core.

It’s an elegant concept. And here’s the part that gets missed: Sinek wasn’t just talking about customers. He was talking about employees. He put it plainly when he said that if a leader can’t clearly explain why the organization exists in terms beyond its products or services, the employees certainly won’t know why they should show up every day. That’s not a marketing problem. That’s an alignment problem. And it starts at the top.

The trouble is that most organizations treat purpose as a branding exercise. They craft an externally facing statement designed to resonate with consumers, investors, and the public—and then assume the internal team will just “get it.” They won’t. Not without deliberate, strategic effort to make purpose come alive from the inside out.

What the Research Keeps Telling Us

The data on this is unambiguous, and it comes from every corner of the business world.

Daniel Pink’s groundbreaking work in Drive demonstrated that the three elements of true human motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—are all intrinsic. Not a single one of them can be manufactured with a bonus structure or a performance incentive. Purpose, specifically, is the element that connects an individual’s daily effort to something larger and more meaningful than the task at hand. Without it, even highly skilled and autonomous employees eventually disengage. They go through the motions. They optimize for survival instead of contribution.

Patrick Lencioni, in The Advantage, went even further. He argued that organizational health—not strategy, not technology, not even talent—is the single greatest competitive advantage a company can achieve. His framework centers on clarity, cohesion, and communication. And at the very core of that clarity is a deceptively simple question every leadership team must answer: Why do we exist?

Lencioni’s insight is that most organizations have more than enough intelligence and expertise to succeed. What they lack is health. And unhealthy organizations—where politics, confusion, and misalignment run unchecked—waste an enormous amount of that intelligence. The answer to “why do we exist” has to be clear enough that every person in the building can articulate it without consulting a document. When it isn’t, you don’t have alignment. You have a collection of individuals optimizing for their own departments.

Brené Brown rounds out this picture with her research on belonging and courageous leadership. In Dare to Lead, she makes a powerful distinction between belonging and fitting in. Belonging, she argues, is about creating environments where people can show up as themselves and feel genuinely valued. Fitting in is its opposite—it requires people to assess, acclimate, and mask. Organizations that only focus on external purpose without doing the internal work of creating true belonging end up with compliant employees, not committed ones. And compliance doesn’t build anything that lasts.

Then there’s the well-worn adage attributed (somewhat loosely) to Peter Drucker: culture eats strategy for breakfast. It’s become a cliché. But the reason it persists is because organizations keep proving it true. You can have the most brilliant external strategy in the world, and it will die in the hallways of a culture where purpose is performative and people feel disconnected from the mission.

In my view, culture doesn't eat strategy - it is your strategy.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

If you think this is a soft issue, look at the math. Companies that both define and act on purpose outperformed the financial markets by 42%. Companies that had a purpose statement but didn’t act on it? They performed at the mean. And those without purpose at all underperformed by the same 42%. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a mirror.

Purpose-driven employees are 54% more likely to stay five or more years and 30% more likely to become top performers. Meanwhile, only 27% of employees and 42% of managers even have access to their company’s strategic plan. Half of middle managers can’t name one of their organization’s top five strategic objectives. Not one.

And here’s the stat that haunts me most: 88% of workers report feeling very or extremely engaged, yet 82% are simultaneously experiencing burnout. Read those numbers again. Nearly everyone says they’re engaged. Nearly everyone is also burning out. That’s not engagement. That’s survival masquerading as commitment. When purpose is hollow or absent, people compensate with sheer effort. They work harder because they don’t have a reason to work smarter, or more meaningfully. And eventually, the well runs dry.

So, we have decades of research from Sinek, Pink, Lencioni, Brown, and a mountain of empirical data all saying the same thing: purpose must be internally compelling before it can be externally valuable. And yet most organizations are still building strategy as if the internal experience of purpose is an afterthought.

Where I Land on This—and Where It Goes Deeper

I agree with every one of these thought leaders. Deeply. Their work has shaped the conversation in ways that matter. And I’ve seen every one of their insights validated in the field, across organizations of all sizes and types.

But here’s where we need to push the conversation further...

Most purpose frameworks stop at the individual or the team. They tell you that purpose matters, but they don’t give you a strategic mechanism for weaving it into the actual architecture of the plan. They treat purpose as a precondition for good work, which it is. But it’s also a strategic element that must be designed for, measured, and held in balance with everything else the organization is trying to accomplish.

This is the heart of what I’ve built with Essential Strategy. The first rule of the framework is this: Purpose is internally compelling and externally valuable in its contribution. That word “internally” isn’t a modifier. It’s the lead. Purpose must speak to the people inside the organization—creating common cause, meaning, and connection—before it can credibly deliver anything to the people the organization serves.

Purpose is not about revenue. It is about contribution. Internally, that contribution is in creating a healthy, sustainable entity that supports all those who make up the greater whole. Externally, it’s in solving a problem or meeting a need. Revenue is not a purpose—it is a metric for how well the organization thrives and thus is able to serve others. This distinction changes everything about how you build a strategic plan.

The Essential Strategy Formula frames strategy around Purpose, Growth, and Evolution managed in dynamic Equilibrium. That equilibrium is the part most organizations miss entirely. They pour resources into growth without investing in the internal conditions that sustain it. They chase evolution—new markets, new technologies, new operating models—without first asking whether the team has the cohesion, clarity, and shared conviction to pull it off.

I discovered this the hard way. Early in my practice, I was building beautifully constructed strategic plans that addressed every blind spot and gap. But when I returned to those same clients to refresh the plan, what I found was that no matter how intricately woven the strategy was around all the right things, if the team in charge of building and implementing it was grappling with trust and cohesion, it just wasn't going work.

Suprise, suprise - it was ALL people stuff. Every last bit of it!

That realization changed everything about how I approach strategy. It sent me back to the drawing board on the PGEE foundation. The elements were right—Purpose, Growth, Evolution in Equilibrium—but there was a critical nuance that had to surface in the conversation. Strategy wasn’t failing because of bad goals or poor market analysis. It was failing because the people charged with executing it hadn’t been brought into the why of it. They hadn’t been asked what the work meant to them, what their own sense of contribution was, or how the organization’s direction connected to their daily experience. They were executing tasks. Not pursuing purpose.

Sinek tells you to start with why. Pink tells you motivation is intrinsic. Lencioni tells you health trumps intelligence. Brown tells you belonging requires courage. I agree with all of it. And what Essential Strategy adds is the structural integration—the strategic mechanism that takes all of these truths and embeds them into the plan itself, not as afterthoughts or HR initiatives, but as top-level imperatives that get the same attention, resources, and accountability as revenue targets and market expansion.

The Real Question You Need to Be Asking

If you’re a CEO or executive director looking at your strategic plan right now, I’d ask you this:

Does your strategy require your organization to thrive internally in order to deliver externally?

Not as a nice-to-have. Not as a culture initiative tucked into the HR section of the plan. As a strategic imperative—with goals, metrics, owners, and accountability—that is given the same weight as growth and market positioning.

Because if internal thriving is not a strategic priority, then you are building on a foundation that will not hold. You are asking people to execute a plan they had no hand in shaping, for a purpose they don’t feel, inside a system that doesn’t see them.

That’s not a strategy. That’s a wish list, and it explains why the statistics on strategy failure haven’t budged in thirty years. Some 90% of organizations fail to execute strategy successfully. We keep blaming execution. We keep pointing to poor communication and ineffective metrics. But the root cause is upstream. If the people doing the work don’t see themselves in the purpose, don’t feel the direction as their own, and aren’t connected to a common cause that matters to them personally—the rest is theater.

Purpose must live inside the organization before it can ever deliver outside of it. The best minds in business have been saying this in different ways for decades. Maybe it’s time to stop nodding along and start building strategy that actually reflects it.

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Erin Sedor is an executive advisor and strategic performance expert with 30+ years helping organizations build strategy that actually works. She is the creator of Essential Strategy and the Quantum Intelligence framework for conscious, adaptive leadership.