When strategy fragments at execution

A Vice President identified an under-targeted customer segment as a growth priority.

Execution responsibility was assigned to three team heads from different functions. Each team owned only a partial view of the customer problem.

No owner was appointed to integrate those views.

All three teams depended on the same research and analytics group for insight generation and execution support.

The group consisted of five people — three permanent staff and two contractors — responsible for business-as-usual reporting, ongoing analytical support, and multiple other initiatives and projects across the organisation.

Capacity was fixed.
Demand was triplicated.

Each team pursued the strategy independently, requesting analysis through its own functional lens.

The research team executed all three streams in parallel, while continuing to service unrelated work.

Work duplicated. Priorities conflicted. Trade-offs went unmanaged.

None of the three initiatives succeeded.

This was not miscommunication.
And it was not a capability issue.

Failure followed from design.

An integrated problem was split across partial owners and set in competition.
None had complete knowledge of the customer segment.

When intent is singular but ownership is fragmented across incomplete views, execution cannot converge.

It fragments by design.