“The most expensive meeting in business is the one where leadership made a million-dollar decision and never once asked the people who would have to live with it what they thought.”
— Cleophus P. Franklin Jr. | Franklin Strategic Solutions™
☕ A Coffee With Cleo Moment
I need to be honest with you.
Every time I hear the phrase “think outside the box” — in a boardroom, a strategy session, a keynote, a team meeting — I want to scream.
And here’s the irony that makes it worse: the phrase itself was born from a puzzle that requires you to get outside the box to solve it.
The nine-dot puzzle — first published in Sam Loyd’s 1914 Cyclopedia of Puzzles and popularized by management consultants in the 1970s as a training exercise — challenges you to connect nine dots arranged in a three-by-three grid using four straight lines without lifting your pen from the paper. The puzzle is nearly impossible to solve as long as you stay inside the imaginary boundary the dots create. The moment you extend your lines beyond it — the moment you literally get outside the box — the solution becomes clear.
The puzzle that gave us the phrase demands the very thing most organizations refuse to provide: permission to go beyond the boundary. And yet since the 1970s, when management consultants popularized it, we have repeated the phrase in meetings, printed it on posters, and built it into vision statements — while systematically building cultures that punish exactly that.
Not because the idea is wrong. But because it is almost never followed by anything real. No toolkit. No framework. No structural change. No investment. Just the phrase — delivered with conviction, occasionally accompanied by a slide — and then business as usual by Thursday.
Now I want you to sit with this for a second before we go any further.
Picture a leadership team — smart people, experienced people, people who have earned their seats at the table — spending months and significant capital building a strategy. Consultants engaged. Decks polished. Rollout planned. And at no point in that entire process did anyone stop, challenge the constraints, push beyond the boundary, or ask the people actually doing the work the two most powerful questions available to any leader:
What do you think?
How do you feel about this?
We have been saying it for decades. We have been ignoring the answer just as long. And we need innovative thinking now more than at any other point in modern business history. Artificial intelligence is reshaping entire industries overnight. Geopolitical disruption is rewriting supply chains in real time. Companies that were dominant five years ago are scrambling to stay relevant today. Business speed, change, and disruption are no longer the exception. They are the operating environment.
Pour yourself a cup. Because we need to talk about what that silence is costing you — and what it’s going to take to finally, genuinely, get out of the box.
What the Data Tells Us
According to Harvard Business Review, 67% of well-formulated strategies fail — not because of poor strategy design, but because of poor execution. Kaplan and Norton put the number even higher, estimating that up to 90% of strategies are never successfully executed. And perhaps the most damning data point of all — Harvard Business Review research found that 95% of a company’s employees are either unaware of or do not understand its strategy.
Ninety-five percent.
Which means the average organization is asking people to execute a plan they don’t understand, didn’t contribute to, and were never invited to question. And then expressing frustration when it doesn’t work.
McKinsey’s 2024 global survey of 1,017 executives across 99 nations found that executives view innovation as their companies’ primary source of competitive advantage for delivering growth. And yet nearly 60% of those same executives reported they are either freezing or cutting their innovation spending. Let that tension sit for a minute.
Innovation is declared essential — and then systematically underfunded. That is not a budget problem. That is a leadership alignment problem.
And Google’s landmark two-year study on team performance — reported by Harvard Business Review — found that the single most important factor separating high-performing teams from everyone else was not talent, strategy, or resources. It was psychological safety. The belief that you can speak your mind, challenge a direction, and offer an unconventional idea without fear of punishment. The behaviors that create market breakthroughs — creative thinking, risk-taking, honest dissent — only happen when people feel safe enough to offer them.
Most organizations are not building that safety. They are building the opposite — and calling the result an innovation problem.
The intelligence gap isn’t in the strategy room. It’s in the distance between the strategy room and the people closest to the work.
The Quizzical Look That Saved Their Bacon
I was brought in to assess a multimillion-dollar strategic initiative for a leadership team that was confident in their plan and eager to move. They had done the work — the analysis, the projections, the implementation timeline. What they hadn’t done was ask their people.
My first question stopped the room cold.
“Before we go any further — did you ask your team what they thought about this and how it would impact their work?”
They looked back at me with a quizzical look. Not defensive. Not dismissive. Just genuinely puzzled — as if the question had never occurred to them as a strategic step worth taking. The answer was no.
I implored them to do one crtical thing before they moved another step. To go to the people on the ground — the ones who would have to execute this plan day in and day out — and ask them two things: what do you think, and how do you feel about this.
What came back changed the trajectory of the entire rollout.
Their people identified implementation bottlenecks that leadership hadn’t anticipated. They surfaced cost-saving alternatives that weren’t visible from the executive floor. They flagged process conflicts that would have created chaos at the point of execution. And perhaps most importantly — being asked at all shifted something in the culture.
The people doing the work felt seen. They felt valued. And because of that, their investment in the strategy’s success became personal. Not obligatory. Just personal.
The strategy didn’t just improve. The people executing it became its most vocal advocates — because they were included.
The Counterarguments — Dismantled
Every time this conversation comes up, the same objections follow — and every one of them deserves a direct answer.
- “It opens a can of worms.” Good. Open it. The worms are already in there — and they have been in there longer than you think. The only question is whether you put them to use now or step on the can later and wonder where all the worms came from. Smart leaders don’t run from the can. They bait the hook, cast the line, and fish out the intelligence that was sitting right there the whole time. The best strategic insights your organization has are already in that can. Open it deliberately — before the lid flies off on its own.
- “We don’t have time.” You don’t have time not to. The organizations that skip the listening step because of schedule pressure are the same ones spending eighteen months and significant capital unwinding a full-scale rollout that two weeks of frontline input would have corrected before it started. Time invested in asking is always cheaper than money spent recovering.
- “People will just complain.” Yes. They will. And they should — because they have been watching the plan develop from a distance with no seat at the table and no invitation to speak. But here is what the research and real experience consistently show: the complaints you hear upfront — before implementation, before the rollout, before the failure — are the ones that save you. And the people who were given the floor to voice their concerns before the launch are the same people who become the loudest champions of the strategy after it. You don’t silence a complaint by ignoring it. You silence it by honoring it. Give people their say up front and watch the complaints turn into ownership. Shut them out, and watch the complaints turn into resistance — and then into the kind of organizational friction that no change management program can fix after the fact. The choice is simple: hear the complaints early and turn them into cheers, or ignore them and pay a far costlier price than feedback.
- “We’re the leaders — that’s why we get paid.” Correct. And your employees are the executors — that’s why they get paid too. You get paid to make the decision. They get paid to make it work. And the fastest way to ensure they can’t make it work is to hand them a plan they had no hand in building and no voice in shaping. So bring them in. Invite them to the table. Ask for their thinking before you finalize yours — and pay them for both their execution and their intelligence. Because the leader who says what do you think before they say here’s what we’re doing isn’t showing weakness. They’re building the one thing no strategy document can manufacture — shared ownership. And when the strategy hits turbulence during execution, and it will, the people who helped build it don’t fold, complain, or disengage. They problem-solve. They protect it. They own it like they built it. Because they did.
The Breakthrough Listening Guide™
The V.O.I.C.E. Framework™ — A Franklin Strategic Solutions™ Framework
Two questions unlock everything. But the discipline around them is what transforms a one-time gesture into a leadership practice that compounds over time.
V — Value the people closest to the work — explicitly and consistently. Before any strategy is finalized or any initiative is launched, acknowledge that the most important intelligence in your organization is held by the people doing the daily work. Make asking them a standard step in your process — not a courtesy, not an afterthought, but a non-negotiable strategic input. They get paid to do the work. Honor them by inviting them to help lead it.
O — Open the floor deliberately and make it safe to be honest. Asking the question is only half the work. People will only answer truthfully when they believe their honesty will be received without consequence. Create the conditions — small groups, one-on-ones, anonymous input channels — that make genuine feedback possible. The quality of what you hear depends entirely on the safety they feel when speaking.
I — Integrate what you hear into the decision. Listening without acting is the fastest way to destroy trust and ensure nobody speaks up next time. When frontline input surfaces a bottleneck, address it. When it reveals a cost saving, capture it. When it challenges an assumption, examine it honestly. Integration is when listening stops being a gesture and becomes a strategy.
C — Close the loop — always. Go back to the people who gave you the feedback and tell them what you did with it. This single step — skipped more often than any other — is what transforms a survey into a relationship and a conversation into a culture. Your people need to see that their voice moved something. When it does, they will never stop giving it to you.
E — Execute with their intelligence built in. The strategy that goes to implementation should look different than the one that came out of the executive planning session — because the people who will execute it made it better. That is not a sign of a weak plan. That is the mark of a wise leader who understood that the most powerful room in the building isn’t the boardroom. It’s the one where the work actually gets done.
Two questions.
No budget required.
No consulting engagement needed.
No new technology to implement.
What do you think? How do you feel about this?
The leaders who ask them consistently will always know more, make better decisions, and execute more effectively than those who don’t. And the people who are asked these two questions will build something the others never will — a genuine reason to make the strategy succeed.
The most sophisticated strategic plan in the world is only as good as the people executing it. And the people who can make it great are already in your building — holding the intelligence you need, waiting for someone with the wisdom to ask for it.
You just have to ask.
“The reservoir of intelligence that will save your next strategy isn’t in a consultant’s report. It’s in the room down the hall — and it’s been waiting for someone to ask.”
— Cleophus P. Franklin Jr. | Franklin Strategic Solutions™
Cleophus P. Franklin Jr. is the Founder and CEO of Franklin Strategic Solutions™, a Senior Corporate Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the University of Houston-Downtown Marilyn Davies College of Business, and author of The Breakthrough Collection™. He is also the Founder of the Franklin Leadership Foundation at Morningside University, which funds scholarships for underprivileged students through the proceeds of his books — because developing the next generation of leaders is not just a professional commitment. It is a personal one. His Substack, Coffee With Cleo, explores leadership, strategy, and the courage it takes to lead well.