Most leadership teams can describe where they want the business to go in three to five years. Fewer can explain how the thousands of decisions between here and there will actually get them there.
That gap shows up clearly in new research from The Brand Consultancy, based on a study of 2,000+ senior executives:
70% expect their organization to outperform its industry over the next 1–2 years. Only 33% are highly confident their current strategy will get them there.
That's not really about confidence. It's about what happens after the strategy is set.
Which markets get funded. Which products ship. Which customers get prioritized. Which hires get made.
Each decision looks small in isolation. Together, they are the strategy. Most get made without the information that would make them good decisions, because gathering that information takes longer than the business is willing to wait.
43% of C-suite leaders call themselves highly confident in their strategy. Under 30% of VPs and senior directors say the same.
The people setting direction believe in it. The people executing it, day to day, don't share that conviction.
That matters because strategy doesn't succeed in the boardroom. It succeeds when a VP two levels down makes a call that reinforces it instead of working around it. If that VP is operating on a different read of the customer than the C-suite is, the strategy is already fractured, and no one will notice until the results come in.
None of these people are wrong, exactly. Each is making a reasonable call based on whatever version of the market reached their desk. The organization ends up spending real money moving in three directions at once and calls it alignment because everyone technically read the same deck.
It's giving people the same evidence before they decide, not after.
The highest-performing organizations don't treat customer insight as something marketing owns and reports on quarterly. They treat it as infrastructure, the thing every function pulls from when it has to make a call:
Without a shared evidence base, organizations default to intuition and internal consensus. Both are useful. Neither holds up when the market moves, and right now the market is moving faster than most planning cycles can track. Assumptions that were accurate 18 months ago are quietly becoming blind spots, and nobody schedules a meeting to re-check an assumption that isn't visibly broken yet.
It's reducing uncertainty enough that a decision made in product, a decision made in sales, and a decision made in the C-suite are all pointed at the same reality.
That's a much lower bar than "everyone agrees." It's also a much higher bar than most companies are actually clearing.
The executives in our study aren't wrong to be optimistic. Growth is genuinely there to be had. But optimism about the destination and confidence in the path are two different things, and right now those two numbers, 70% and 33%, are telling two different stories.
Closing that gap isn't about writing a better strategy document. It's about making sure the people executing the strategy are working from the same picture of the market as the people who wrote it.
The organizations that pull ahead over the next few years won't be the ones with the most ambitious plans. Most competitors will have comparably ambitious plans. They'll be the ones where a decision made in a regional sales office and a decision made in the C-suite are, more often than not, pointed at the same target.