Anyone who hears a great story will ask if it’s based on truth.

It’s no secret that great strategy often fails to deliver on its promise.

In 1937 Nobel prize-winning economist Ronald Coase described in his paper the reasons why firms exist, based on the difference between internal and external transaction costs.

The more people are involved in a given task, he explained, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and therefore the greater become the transaction costs.

It’s no secret that great strategy often fails to deliver on its promise.

The problems inherent in managing such transaction costs continue to be one of the basic constraints shaping institutions of all kinds.

We can see Coase’s theory holding up in its application to strategy.

A strategy should be the grand theory of the organisation and the glue that holds its individual actors and activities in a coherent pattern.

It is codified behaviour designed to deliver a desired result, and it is commonly put together by a team at the top which understands its detail intimately.

Yet despite intentions to convey strategy as the mechanism that takes an organisation forward reliably, things don’t always go as planned.

There may be many reasons for this. But even great strategy will fail if the manner of its communication falls short: essentially, if “your plan” is to succeed as “our plan”, everyone has to come on board and clearly understand it.

If experience suggests a different reality, however, it is that even some of a strategy’s authors may not understand their creation sufficiently. As such, the likelihood that their own impairment will become an obstacle in its effective subsequent relay to others becomes a near certainty.