What Elizabeth Holmes Can Teach Leaders About Why Strategies Fail

The film argues the opposite. Give people everything without a shared way to read it, and you don’t get one picture. You get as many pictures as there are people watching. 

Transparency isn’t translation 

In my book It Looked Great on Paper, I call this the translation gap. Society has built entire disciplines around crafting strategy and around executing it. The layer in between, where a statement on a slide becomes a decision at someone’s desk, gets treated like plumbing. Leaders assume it works because they can’t see it leak. 

It leaks constantly. In 1990, Stanford graduate student Elizabeth Newton asked people to tap out well-known songs on a table and predict how many listeners would name the tune. Tappers guessed half. Listeners got roughly one in 40. The tappers couldn’t unhear the melody playing in their heads. So they couldn’t imagine hearing only knuckles on wood. 

Leaders are tappers. When you say “customer-first,” you hear the whole song: the lost account that prompted it, the margin debate you won, the tradeoffs you already rejected.  

Your team hears taps. Sales fills in “say yes to every request.” Operations fills in “never ship anything less than perfect.” Finance fills in “protect our best accounts.” Each fills in the melody that fits their role, and each is certain they’re humming yours. 

When interpretation becomes identity 

This is where a communication problem turns into a fracture. 

Misread instructions are easy to correct. Misread strategies are not because people don’t just act on their interpretation. They build an identity around it.  

Operations stop being the team that ships and becomes the team that protects quality from everyone else. Sales becomes the team that actually listens to customers. Once an interpretation becomes who a group is, a different reading stops looking like a translation error. It looks like a character flaw. 

That’s the moment the organization splits. Not into people who support the strategy and people who resist it, but into camps who each believe they’re the only ones honoring it. Every conflict gets read as proof. Every compromise feels like betrayal. 

The film shows how durable this is. Holmes’s parents, on hand to see her off to prison, still believe she’s innocent. Holmes disputes nearly everything written about her. Conviction doesn’t need agreement or evidence. It needs a story that holds together from the inside, and every story does. 

So, leaders do what feels responsible. They communicate more. Another town hall, another FAQ. But you can’t out-volume an identity. More information gives each camp more material to defend the story it already tells about itself. 

You’re not the camera; you’re in the frame 

The sharpest move Fielder and Oppenheim make is turning the lens on themselves. They question their own motives, their own edits, their own growing familiarity with the person they’re supposed to be observing. Reviewers noted the film treats everyone as shaping the truth to their own ends, the filmmakers included. 

Leaders rarely grant themselves the same scrutiny. They treat the strategy in their heads as the original and everyone else’s version as the copy that got distorted. But your version is an edit too. By the time a strategy reaches the all-hands, you’ve cut the doubts, smoothed over the debates, and forgotten half the options you killed.  

What you’re broadcasting isn’t the strategy. It’s your interpretation of it, compressed and polished. 

So, the question was never how to get your team to see what you see. It’s how to give everyone, including you, the same lens. 

Decide the reading or someone else will 

Interpretation is going to happen. The only choice is whether you design it or inherit it. That’s what the Steering Guide framework does: it builds the translation layer deliberately, so the strategy reads the same way at every desk. 

2. One guiding principle: Not a value, not a tagline, not a mission statement. A thesis that names the core trait that defines your organization, inside the culture and in front of customers. One per company, never one per department. It’s the reference point for every call made when you’re not in the room.
3. Core commitments that don’t bend by department: These are mindsets, and they apply identically from the front desk to the boardroom. The moment each function drafts its own version, you’ve handed every camp an official charter for its interpretation. 
4. Supporting actions anyone can observe: Each follows one formula: by specific action, to benefit. For example, “By confirming the customer’s definition of done before scoping, to prevent rework.” The action is the same for everyone. A project manager and a controller apply it to different work, but both can answer the same question at the end of the day: did I do this? 

Then run the test. Ask five people from five functions what the strategy requires of them this week. If you get five answers, you don’t have a communication problem. You have five strategies. 

You can’t see everything. Lead like it. 

Holmes’s promise to her filmmakers couldn’t be kept, and not because she hid anything. No one sees everything. Every viewer brings a lens, and the lens decides what the footage means. 

Your team watches you the same way. They replay your words, your decisions, the things you didn’t say, and build a story that makes sense from where they sit. You can’t stop that. But you can decide whether they’re all reading from the same script or each writing their own. 

Strategies rarely fail because people ignored them. They fail because everyone followed a different one. 

Publication : Inc.
 
Author : ANDREA OLSON