Over the past 18 months, we’ve seen a pattern play out in dozens of executive strategy sessions. Teams talk about goals with confidence, but the conversation truly comes alive when blockers are discussed.
Blockers are powerful because they contextualise strategy. They show leaders not just what they want to achieve but what is standing in the way. Once blockers are visible, strategies and tactics to remove or reduce them become clearer.
Awareness: Seeing What Was Always There
Every organisation sets goals: revenue growth, efficiency targets, customer loyalty, transformation and innovation. For government and not-for-profits, goals may also include community impact, service delivery, equity, or sustainability.
But goals alone don’t deliver results. Blockers make the abstract tangible — the specific reasons why strategy stalls. In our work, we’ve surfaced 52 possible blockers, but seven appear more often than any others.
The Most Common Blockers We’ve Seen
- Misalignment of team goals with business objectives
Why it happens: Goals may be poorly communicated, misunderstood, or not cascaded in ways that make them relevant.
What can be done: Translate enterprise goals into team objectives, check for understanding, and connect individual work to the bigger picture. - Excessive workload & limited capacity
Why it happens: Business-as-usual consumes bandwidth, leaving no space for strategic projects. Urgent issues push aside the important.
What can be done: Apply prioritisation frameworks, protect capacity for strategic work, and build accountability for delivery. - Lack of skilled talent / insufficient training
Why it happens: The right skills aren’t always in the right place at the right time — and sometimes there simply aren’t enough of them.
What can be done: Plan workforce capability, invest in targeted training, or rebalance workloads through partnerships and recruitment. - Slow or fragmented decision-making
Why it happens: Too many approval layers or overly centralised control delay progress.
What can be done: Clarify governance, delegate decision rights, and simplify approval paths. - Resistance to change & poor adoption of new tech
Why it happens: Change stalls when communication is weak or when adoption is treated as an afterthought.
What can be done: Build a structured change plan, communicate relevance to each group, and use champions to drive uptake. - Poor customer understanding / limited market insight
Why it happens: Leaders rely on past practice rather than testing assumptions or validating with customers.
What can be done: Run customer validation loops, refresh data regularly, and ensure strategies are customer-informed. - Weak cross-team collaboration & siloed working
Why it happens: Teams optimise for their own goals and lose sight of collective outcomes.
What can be done: Create shared metrics, foster joint accountability, and reinforce the organisation-wide goal.
These blockers don’t appear in every organisation, but they are by far the most frequently chosen blockers across industries.
Why These Seven Keep Surfacing
While A2A offers 52 possible blockers, these seven dominate because they cut across sectors and strategy types. They cluster around three critical themes:
- Alignment & Culture – misalignment of goals, silos, resistance to change, and slow decision-making.
- Execution Pressure – excessive workload and limited capacity, where business-as-usual squeezes out strategy.
- Capability Gaps – lack of skilled talent and limited customer insight.
These aren’t niche or one-off issues; they are the always-on barriers to strategy execution. They persist because they are systemic, deeply human, and easy to underplay until they’re made visible.
Why Unanimity on Blockers is Healthy
One unexpected benefit of working with blockers is the consensus it creates. When a team agrees on which blockers matter most, it permits people to raise objections or concerns about potential goals, but in a way that doesn’t feel negative.
Instead of derailing the discussion, blockers provide a safe and structured way to say: “This won’t work unless we address…”. That moment of honesty is rare in strategy conversations, and it’s healthy.
By naming blockers upfront, teams aren’t just planning for success; they are future pacing their goals. They anticipate the obstacles that could derail execution and agree on strategies to overcome them. That increases the chance of success because the plan is built with reality in mind, not just aspiration.
From Awareness to Action
Identifying a blocker is only the first step. The real value lies in unpacking why it exists and building strategies and tactics that directly address it.
- A blocker of slow decision-making leads to clarifying governance and delegating authority.
- A blocker of excessive workload results in prioritisation frameworks and capacity planning.
- A blocker of resistance to new tech drives adoption plans and targeted communication.
What makes this process powerful is that the team does the thinking themselves. They develop actionable strategies, tactics, and metrics that directly address their business goals, team goals, and blockers. The report that follows isn’t just a record, it’s a roadmap, capturing the team’s decisions in a way that makes execution practical, accountable, and measurable.
AI: The Next Layer of Blockers
As AI reshapes work, the blocker conversation becomes even more urgent.
- New blockers may emerge: too many pilots with no integration, mistrust of AI outputs, ethics and accountability questions, and widening skill divides.
- Some blockers may shrink: automation reducing workload, dashboards breaking silos, and analytics sharpening customer insight.
AI is both a potential blocker and a powerful enabler. How organisations manage that tension will define whether AI drives alignment or creates fresh fractures.
Final Thought
In every strategy session, goals set the vision. But blockers spark the awareness that alignment depends on. And when awareness is combined with alignment and action, strategies stop being abstract and become real.
If these are the blockers most often chosen from the set of 52, then the question becomes:
What would change in your organisation if blockers were surfaced early, agreed upon collectively, and turned into strategies and actions that everyone owned?
Alignment isn’t just about what you want to achieve. It’s about the blockers you’re willing and equipped to overcome.
