The Action-Response Principle

Why execution excellence no longer guarantees results
By Deano Gomes-Luis

Most organisations are not short on activity.
Projects are launched.
Initiatives are delivered.
Plans are executed.
From the inside, the organisation feels busy, committed, and productive. From the outside, however, the results often look flatter than expected.
This gap between effort and outcome is one of the most common – and least examined – leadership frustrations.

I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly in organisations that pride themselves on execution. Delivery disciplines are strong. Governance is tight. Performance management is taken seriously.
And yet, despite all of that, outcomes underperform expectations.
The usual response is predictable: push harder. Tighten controls. Add more oversight. Increase cadence. Improve compliance.
Sometimes that works.
Often, it doesn’t.

The problem isn’t that execution matters less than it used to.
It’s that execution is only half of the system.
Most performance thinking stops at doing the work. It assumes that once something is delivered – a change, a service, a decision, a message – the rest will take care of itself.
It rarely does.

Here’s the missing half:
Performance doesn’t end at delivery.
It completes at the point where delivery meets expectation.
That moment – where intent is interpreted, where meaning is assigned, where behaviour either shifts or doesn’t – is where outcomes are actually decided.
Yet in most organisations, that moment is largely invisible.

This is why teams can execute flawlessly and still fail to move the needle.
A new process is rolled out, but people work around it.
A strategy is announced, but momentum never forms.
A customer experience is redesigned, but loyalty doesn’t improve.
The action happened.
The response didn’t.
Without response, performance stalls – even as activity increases.

What makes this particularly costly is that the signals are subtle.
Dashboards still look healthy.
Milestones are still met.
Progress reports still read well.
The value leakage happens quietly, in the space between what was intended and what was experienced.
By the time outcomes disappoint, the organisation has already moved on to the next initiative.

The leaders who close this gap think about performance differently.
They don’t ask only “Was this delivered well?”
They also ask “How was this received?”
They design actions with expectations in mind.
They pay attention to early signals of misalignment.
They treat weak response as information, not failure.
This doesn’t slow execution.
It sharpens it.

So before launching the next initiative, it’s worth pausing on one question:
What assumption are we making about how this will be experienced — and how will we know if that assumption is wrong?
Until that question is answered, performance remains only partially visible.

Execution completes work.
Response completes performance.
Ignoring either guarantees disappointment.

This article reflects ideas explored more fully in Beyond Execution, where I introduce the Action–Response Principle – a way of seeing how value is formed at the point of delivery, and why strong execution alone rarely creates the impact leaders expect.