Your strategy is sound.
The numbers aren't moving.
It's behavior or structure. Usually both.
I fix both at once. Fortis Forge works with VPs through CEOs who own the number.
“Something's not working. I've got a good strategy. I've got a good team. The numbers still aren't moving. And I'm the one who has to explain it.”
If that is your sentence, the problem is probably not the people, and it is probably not the plan. It is the machine between them.
The sentence we hear most often:
What it looks like from the seat
You are the escalation path.
The two functions have a truce, not an agreement.
The people who leave are the ones you wanted to keep.
Every review is green until it isn't.
Decisions that should have died two levels down arrive on your calendar instead. Nobody is doing anything wrong. The system routes them to you, and it does it every week.
Status glows. Dashboards look healthy. Then a quarter goes sideways and everyone wants to know why nobody saw it coming. Nobody saw it coming because the system was built to hide it.
They stopped fighting in meetings. They did not start working together. They work around each other, and the seam is where your delivery dates go to die.
Capable people go. The comfortable ones stay. However the incentives got that way, they are yours now, and they are still running.
Twelve things that show up before the numbers do
Free, and I don't want your email for it. Opens PDF, new tab.
Most people in that seat get offered one of two fixes.
An offsite, a speaker, a values workshop.
Everyone leaves inspired on Thursday and the calendar is unchanged by Monday.
A six-figure study with a hundred slides and a recommendation nobody has the authority to execute.
It lands in a drawer.
Both miss the same fact. The behavior you are watching is an output. Something upstream is producing it, on schedule, every week, whether anyone intends it or not.
Structure is how you change behavior without asking anyone to change.
Both of the usual answers are wrong
Fix the people.
Fix the paper.
Two levers, one diagnosis
Executive coaching
When the fault is in how someone leads.
Six months. Working sessions every other week, ninety minutes. Once a month I sit in on a live meeting, so the work runs on what actually happens in the room instead of what gets reported afterward. When something breaks on a Tuesday, you have me on Tuesday.
Scoped to the levers you actually hold. If your authority stops at your own team, that is where we work, and the structural piece stages behind whatever authority arrives.
Structural advisory
When the fault is in org design, cadence, decision rights, or reporting lines.
Six months embedded. A working block on site each month, standing time with you between them, and a seat inside your operating rhythm so I watch the system run instead of hearing a summary of it.
Not a report. A change, made with you in the room, that holds after I leave.
Most engagements use both. Which one carries the weight is something we find out in the first conversation.
I was invited to sit in on a quarterly review. An executive was mid-drone, talking strategic synchronization. Slide 14 beamed a green light behind him. Everyone nodded.
Three floors below, the team he was reporting on was in open revolt. The lead had walked out the week before. The on-target project was a pile of unfinished ideas held together by deadline pressure and quiet panic.
The slide stayed green, and not because anyone lied. In that company, red was treated as a failure of character. The person who flagged red got asked what was wrong with them. The person who kept it green got asked nothing. So the slides stayed green, and the decisions got made on fiction.
Nobody in that room needed a values workshop. They needed a status process that did not punish the truth. That is a structural fix to a behavioral problem, and it is most of what this work turns out to be.
One review, in full
Former Partner at McChrystal Group. Six years embedded with Fortune 500 leadership teams across technology, healthcare, oil and gas, and finance, working the machinery underneath their strategy.
Before that, two decades as a U.S. Marine Corps Infantry Officer, including combat command in Iraq and operations at NATO. In those environments misalignment does not produce a bad quarter. It produces casualties.
Author of The Alignment Habit, with a foreword by General Stanley McChrystal.
I come in as an operator. The work is not analysis you receive. It is change you make, with me in the room while you make it.
About Todd
The $22M hardware story, the honesty-punishing CEO, the four-sentence decision cycle, and more.
Foreword by General Stanley McChrystal.
The thinking, in writing
Ready to talk?
If that sentence at the top of this page was yours, the conversation is worth having.
Thirty minutes. No pitch, no deck, no framework overview, no homework.
We talk about what is breaking in your seat and whether either lever is the right one for it. If neither is, I will tell you that on the call.
+1 (231) 313-6804