Live with Colette Molteni & Neha Kabra - The Strategy Was Right. So Why Didn't It Deliver?

Thank you Neha Kabra for joining on me for a Empathy Elevated Substack Live on July 10th. Our conversation

Strategy documents read like promises. Clean vision, confident arrows, a room full of nodding heads.

Then execution starts, and the thing you agreed to stops looking like the thing you’re doing.

I sat down for a Substack Live with Neha Kabra, a Partner at McKinsey’s who’s spent 12+ years inside enterprise change. She writes The Humanizing. Read her. She brought a framework worth leveraging.

The ACID Test

Neha’s diagnostic for pressure-testing a strategy before it hits the ground, four shocks, run by the top team before anyone signs off:

A. Assumptions. Name the five or ten that actually matter. If they don’t hold, does the strategy survive?

C. Coordination. Enterprise value rarely happens in isolation. If the coordination breaks down and data, tech, risk, and human change fail to move together, does the plan still stand?

I. Incentives. You planned for $100M. The board just handed you $50M. Which initiatives survive the cut? That question, asked early, surfaces your realest priorities.

D. Decision mechanisms. Does hierarchy override rationality when it matters? Neha’s example: a copilot with no verified benefit, greenlit anyway because the head of retail has the clout to push it through. That’s not a strategy failure. That’s a decision-mechanism failure.

Run a strategy through those four shocks, and you don’t just stress-test it; you surface who’s playing it safe, who’s going bold, and who’s quietly lobbying one-on-one instead of raising it in the room.

Prediction is a practice, not a hypothesis.

Before any strategy gets signed off, Neha interviews the management team one-on-one, not to catch anyone out, but to surface the disagreements and quiet concerns a group setting buries. The findings are anonymized and played back to the full team.

Her closing thought stayed with me: organizations keep trying to solve behavior problems with intelligence, more data, more tech, more sophistication stacked on a people problem that was never going to be solved that way. The trade-offs are still made by humans. The biases still show up.

Full credit to Neha Kabra for the ACID framework. Go read her at The Humanizing.

Which shock breaks your current strategy first?