Introduction
After 20+ years advising governments, development institutions, and private enterprises across Africa, the Americas, and Europe, I have observed a consistent pattern: stunning PowerPoint decks that promise transformation, followed by implementation that stalls somewhere between pilot and scale. The data tells a sobering story. Research indicates that approximately 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail to meet their objectives (Meltingspot, 2024), while a recent McKinsey survey found that only 21% of executives reported their strategies passed even four basic quality tests, a 40% decline from a decade ago (McKinsey, 2024). In emerging markets, where institutional capacity is often weaker and political economy constraints more acute, these failure rates are even more pronounced.
The irony is stark: emerging markets often produce the most ambitious strategic visions precisely because the development gaps are so visible. A ministry of finance will commission a comprehensive digital transformation roadmap. A state enterprise will unveil a five-year modernization plan. An infrastructure agency will present a climate-resilient investment strategy. The analysis is rigorous, the frameworks borrowed from Boston Consulting Group or McKinsey, the financial projections compelling. Yet three years later, the same organizations remain trapped in "pilot purgatory", endless proof-of-concepts that never graduate to operational reality.
This is not a failure of vision. It's a failure of execution architecture.
Why the Strategy-Execution Gap Widens in Emerging Markets
The execution challenge in emerging markets is fundamentally different from that in advanced economies. It's not simply about having fewer resources or weaker technical skills, though both matter. The deeper issue lies in what development economists call "institutional voids", the absence of delivery infrastructure that advanced economies take for granted.
Consider what happens after a strategy deck is approved. In a well-functioning institutional environment, execution unfolds through established mechanisms: procurement systems that work, project management offices with real authority, performance dashboards that trigger accountability, talent markets that supply capable implementers. In emerging markets, these mechanisms are often weak, inconsistent, or captured by political interests.
Recent analysis from the OECD highlights how emerging markets face critical governance challenges including inconsistent regulations, weak institutional capacity, and non-transparent management systems (OECD, 2024). When you layer onto this the reality that many strategic initiatives are designed by external consultants who depart before implementation begins, you get a predictable outcome: beautifully designed strategies meeting poorly designed delivery systems.
The problem compounds when organizations mistake activity for progress. Pacepoint have watched teams hold dozens of coordination meetings, produce hundreds of status reports, and celebrate the launch of "steering committees" while actual delivery metrics, citizens served, systems deployed, outcomes achieved, remain static. This creates what we call "motion without transformation": everyone is busy, but nothing fundamentally changes.
There is also a subtler dynamic at play. In many emerging market contexts, the political economy rewards announcing initiatives more than completing them. A minister gains visibility from launching a digital ID system; whether it actually registers 50 million citizens five years later is a problem for their successor. Consultants and contractors optimize for winning the next contract, not necessarily delivering results on the current one. This misalignment of incentives systematically undermines execution.
Execution as an Architectural Problem
At Pacepoint Advisory, we have come to view execution not as a management challenge to be motivated away, but as an architectural problem to be designed for. This perspective shift is crucial. You cannot inspire your way to successful execution in environments with weak delivery infrastructure. You need to build that infrastructure as deliberately as you build strategy.
This means treating execution capability as a first-order design constraint, not an implementation detail. When a client asks us to help design a national digital economy strategy, we insist on answering three questions before touching the strategy itself: Who will actually implement this? What delivery mechanisms exist to support them? How will we know if it is working?
Too often, these questions are treated as "operational details" to be figured out later. But in emerging markets, these operational details determine whether strategy translates into reality. The architecture of execution, the systems, processes, accountability mechanisms, and capability-building approaches, must be designed with the same rigor as the strategy itself.
Building the Roadmap: Five Pillars of Execution Architecture
Based on our experience supporting transformation programs across three continents, we have identified five essential pillars for building execution capability in emerging market contexts.
1. Clarity of Intent: Converting Strategy into Measurable Outcomes
The first execution failure happens in the strategy phase itself: vague objectives that sound inspiring but cannot be measured. "Modernize government services." "Accelerate digital transformation." "Improve financial inclusion." These are not execution targets; they are aspirations.
Execution requires translating strategic intent into concrete, measurable outcomes with clear timelines. Not "improve healthcare access," but "reduce average waiting time for primary care appointments from 14 days to 3 days in 50 urban clinics by Q4 2026." Not "strengthen SME competitiveness," but "increase formal SME access to digital payment systems from 23% to 60% across five target regions by December 2027."
This specificity forces difficult trade-offs during strategy design. You cannot do everything, so what are the three to five breakthrough outcomes that would constitute genuine transformation? These become the north star for all execution activity. Every initiative, every budget allocation, every hiring decision should connect directly to these outcome targets.
We also build in what we call "reality checkpoints", quarterly reviews where teams assess not whether activities happened, but whether outcome trajectories are improving. If six months into a financial inclusion program, the adoption rate has not moved from baseline, that is not a reason for another workshop. It's a signal that the underlying theory of change is flawed and needs fundamental rethinking.
2. Delivery Infrastructure: Building Program Management Maturity
Emerging market organizations often lack what we call "delivery muscle", the organizational capability to execute complex, multi-stakeholder programs reliably. This is not about individual competence; it's about systems and processes.
Building delivery infrastructure means establishing several foundational elements. First, a program management office (PMO) with real authority, not a reporting function, but a delivery engine that can allocate resources, escalate blockers, and make binding decisions. We have seen too many "PMOs" that are glorified documentation centers, producing beautiful Gantt charts that have no connection to actual work.
Second, it requires implementing modern project management disciplines even in contexts where they do not naturally exist. This means agile delivery methodologies, sprint-based planning, daily standups, retrospectives, the full toolkit that allows teams to learn and adapt rapidly. When we supported a public-private renewable energy program in West Africa, we introduced two-week sprint cycles for a team that had previously operated on annual planning horizons. The initial resistance was significant, but within three months, delivery velocity had tripled simply because blockers were surfaced and resolved weekly instead of annually.
Third, delivery infrastructure needs what the World Bank calls "implementation arrangements", clear delineation of who does what, by when, with what resources. This sounds basic, but in practice, it's where many programs collapse. Multiple agencies with overlapping mandates, budget authority separated from delivery responsibility, contractors without clear deliverables, these structural tangles doom execution before it begins.
3. Capability and Leadership: Empowering Local Delivery Teams
One of the most persistent myths in development consulting is that you can "transfer" execution capability through training workshops. We have learned painfully that capability-building requires a fundamentally different approach: embedding advisors within delivery teams for extended periods, creating learning-by-doing environments, and developing local leadership that owns the transformation journey.
This means shifting from a consultant-led model to a partner-led model. Instead of external experts designing solutions that locals implement, we work alongside in-country teams as they design and deliver. The expertise transfer happens through joint problem-solving on real challenges, not through PowerPoint presentations about best practices.
Leadership development is particularly critical. Transformation requires leaders who can navigate political complexity, build coalitions, manage stakeholder resistance, and maintain momentum through setbacks. These are fundamentally different skills from technical strategy design. We invest heavily in identifying and developing what we call "transformation champions", mid-level leaders with credibility, agency relationships, and the political savvy to drive change.
Recent research on strategy execution emphasizes this point: before any strategy can influence competitive dynamics, it must survive your internal system (McKinsey, 2024). In emerging markets, this means building leaders who understand how to work within, and gradually reshape institutional constraints rather than pretending those constraints don't exist.
4. Technology as an Enabler: Digital Tools for Execution Discipline
Technology plays a crucial but often misunderstood role in execution. The temptation is to view digital transformation as primarily about deploying new technology platforms. Our experience suggests the opposite: technology's greatest value in execution is as a discipline-forcing mechanism.
When we support government agencies or development programs, we insist on establishing digital execution dashboards from day one, not sophisticated business intelligence systems, but simple, real-time trackers of key metrics. How many beneficiaries reached this week? How many pilot sites are operational? How much budget disbursed versus planned? These dashboards serve two purposes: they make progress (or lack thereof) visible to all stakeholders, and they force teams to confront reality weekly rather than annually.
Data discipline is transformative in contexts where information opacity has historically enabled poor performance to hide. If you are a program director and every Monday morning you must report to stakeholders how many citizens you served last week, two things happen: you figure out how to measure it accurately, and you become intensely focused on moving that number.
We have also learned that in emerging markets, technology solutions must be designed for constrained environments, intermittent power, limited connectivity, and users with varied digital literacy. Over-engineering kills adoption. The most successful execution technologies we have deployed have been deliberately simple: mobile-based data collection, SMS-based status reporting, and cloud-hosted dashboards accessible on basic smartphones.
Artificial intelligence is emerging as a powerful execution enabler, particularly for predictive analytics. By analyzing patterns in project data, AI can identify implementation risks early, which pilot sites are likely to underperform, which procurement processes are stalled, and which technical teams need support. But these capabilities only work when basic data discipline already exists.
5. Governance and Adaptability: Sustaining Execution Through Change
The final pillar addresses a reality that strategy documents often ignore: circumstances change, assumptions prove wrong, political winds shift. Execution frameworks must embed mechanisms for adaptation without losing strategic coherence.
This requires governance structures that can make fast decisions with incomplete information. In our work, we advocate for what we call "thin governance", small, empowered decision-making bodies that meet weekly, have clear decision rights, and can pivot quickly when reality diverges from plan. This contrasts with the "thick governance" common in emerging market bureaucracies: large steering committees that meet quarterly, require consensus from dozens of stakeholders, and take months to approve course corrections.
We also built in structured learning mechanisms. Every quarter, implementation teams conduct "after-action reviews" that rigorously examine what worked, what did not, and why. These are not blame exercises; they are learning engines. The insights feed directly into revised implementation plans. A financial inclusion program we supported in West Africa used these reviews to discover that their flagship digital wallet product was failing not due to technology issues but because rural women lacked the national ID cards required for registration. This insight triggered a complete pivot, working with civil registry authorities to enable alternative identity verification, which unlocked adoption.
Critically, adaptive governance requires documenting the assumptions underpinning strategic decisions. When execution stalls, you need to distinguish between implementation failures (we are not executing the plan well) and strategy failures (the plan's underlying logic is flawed). Without clear assumption-tracking, organizations waste years trying to execute harder rather than rethinking whether they are executing the right thing.
Toward Delivery-Driven Transformation
The fundamental shift required for successful execution in emerging markets is philosophical: moving from strategy-as-vision to strategy-as-delivery-design. This does not mean abandoning ambition or settling for incrementalism. It means designing ambitious strategies with execution reality as the primary constraint.
In our strategy work now, we refuse to present a strategic plan without an accompanying execution architecture. Our deliverables include not just what to do, but precisely how to do it: organizational structures required, decision-making protocols, capability gaps to fill, technology systems to deploy, governance cadences to establish, and outcome metrics to track.
We also insist on "skin in the game." Rather than design-and-depart consulting, we commit to supporting implementation for extended periods, with our success measured by whether outcome targets are actually achieved, not whether strategy documents are approved. This aligns our incentives with clients' real interests.
The emerging market context requires this execution-first mindset even more than advanced economies. When institutional infrastructure is weak, you cannot outsource execution to "the system." You must consciously build the execution infrastructure as part of the strategic intervention itself. This is harder, slower, and more complex than writing strategy documents, but it's the only path from ambition to impact.
Looking Forward: Building Execution Capability at Scale
The development challenges facing emerging markets, climate adaptation, digital transformation, economic diversification, and service delivery improvement all require execution at unprecedented scale. The traditional model of international consultants designing strategies that local institutions struggle to implement is clearly not working.
What is needed is a fundamental reorientation: treating execution capability-building as infrastructure investment. Just as countries invest in roads, power grids, and telecommunications networks, they must invest in delivery systems, program management capabilities, data discipline, performance accountability mechanisms, and adaptive governance structures.
This is not just a public sector challenge. Private investors increasingly recognize that execution risk in emerging markets often exceeds technology or market risk. Companies that can reliably deliver complex programs in challenging institutional environments create sustainable competitive advantages.
For development institutions, bilateral donors, and impact investors, this suggests shifting resources from strategy consulting toward execution support, embedding advisors within implementation teams, funding delivery infrastructure, and measuring success by outcomes achieved rather than reports produced.
The transformation agenda for emerging markets remains urgent and achievable. Economic growth potential is substantial, demographic dividends are real, and technological leapfrogging opportunities are genuine. But realizing this potential requires moving beyond the strategy-execution gap that has constrained progress for decades.
Strategy makes promises; execution keeps them, and in emerging markets, the world is watching who delivers.
