Where Numbers Meet People: Defining and Leading the Strategy-Execution Interface (SEI)

Abstract

Persistent gaps between strategic intent and coordinated action (execution) have intensified as work becomes more interdependent, digitally mediated, and distributed across organizational boundaries. Adjacent literatures explain parts of this challenge: strategy process examines how strategies emerge and evolve; implementation science focuses on adoption and fidelity; relational coordination emphasizes communication and relationships; OKR/OKRops practice provides alignment tooling; and operations visibility foregrounds flow and performance metrics. Yet these streams leave under-theorized how translation is governed at the boundary between strategy and execution: the recurring work of converting strategic intent into interdependent commitments, boundary objects, and feedback loops that enable coordinated action despite differences in meaning, authority, and information. This paper advances the Strategy-Execution Interface (SEI) as a meta-architecture of coherence integrating three dimensions - structural, relational, and translational, across three levers - accountability, communication, and visibility, forming a 3×3 matrix of diagnosable cells and actionable interventions. The paper theorizes two dynamic failure patterns - drift and breakpoints, illustrated through multi-context vignettes (healthcare pathways, product platforms, public services), and advances testable hypotheses (H1-H7) with an empirical design combining existing multi-source surveys and digital trace data to estimate moderated mediation models and identify drift and breakpoint dynamics.