Get It. Want It. Can Do It. So Why Isn't It Happening?

Here's a pattern I keep seeing across completely different organizations.

Someone gets a role that comes with real responsibility. Maybe it's business development, maybe it's operational improvement, maybe it's leading a new function. They're smart. They're experienced. They understand what needs to happen.

And then it just... doesn't happen. Or it happens slowly, after multiple check-ins, reminders, and conversations about why this matters.

The easy explanation is that the person lacks discipline or motivation. I don't think that's usually true, and I think it's a lazy diagnosis that doesn't actually fix anything. When you look closer, the real problem is almost always one of two things: something is missing in the person, or something is missing around them.

Start with the person

Earlier in my career, I worked at a boutique consultancy where the founder taught me a simple triage for this, and I still use it before anything else. When someone isn't following through, ask three questions:

Do they get it? Do they actually understand what's expected and why it matters, or have they just nodded along in a meeting.

Do they want it? Is there something real in it for them, or are they executing someone else's priority with no stake in the outcome.

Can they do it? Do they have the actual skill and resources to execute, or have they been handed a responsibility that requires capabilities nobody ever built in them.

Most performance conversations stop here, and for a lot of situations, that's enough. But I've watched plenty of people who clearly get it, want it, and can do it still stall out. That's when the problem isn't the person. It's the system around them.

Then look at the system: DRIVE

Even a capable, motivated person with the right skills will stall without the right structure around them. I think about that structure in five parts, which spell DRIVE:

Direction. People are told to "grow the business" or "improve delivery" without a specific target. Vague direction produces vague action. If someone can't tell you exactly what they own, by when, and what success looks like, there's nothing concrete to execute against. This is the "do they get it" question, made structural instead of personal.

Reward. Is there a real incentive that lines up with the behavior leadership wants, or does the reward structure quietly point somewhere else. This is the organizational version of "do they want it." Sometimes the answer is no, not because the person lacks motivation, but because the system doesn't actually reward the thing it's asking for.

Insight. This is the one that gets overlooked the most. People don't know what's being measured, how their progress compares to anyone else's, or whether their results are actually visible to leadership. Without something to see, there's no felt urgency and no feedback loop. This is often the highest leverage fix, because it's structural. You're not trying to motivate anyone. You're just making the gap impossible to ignore.

Verification. There's no regular rhythm where someone has to report progress out loud to another person. Leaders end up supplying this manually, through reminders and check-ins, which works for a while and then quietly burns everyone out. Real accountability has to live inside the organization, not in someone's inbox.

Enablement. This is the organizational version of "can they do it." Sometimes people aren't executing because they genuinely don't know how, not because they're avoiding the work. This shows up a lot with deep functional experts who are excellent at their specialty but have never had to build a growth plan, standardize a process, or run cross-functional delivery. Asking a specialist to think like a generalist without giving them that muscle sets them up to stall, no matter how much encouragement they get.

Why this matters

Most organizations default to treating every stalled initiative as a discipline problem. More check-ins. More encouragement. More explaining why it matters. If the real issue is direction, insight, or enablement, none of that moves the needle. It just adds pressure without adding traction, and eventually the person doing the "encouraging" is doing the work themselves out of frustration.

The fix starts with diagnosis, not effort. Before you push harder on someone's follow-through, it's worth asking whether the gap is in the person or in the system around them, and which piece of DRIVE is actually missing.

This is the same gap Fox and Rain helps to close. If this sounds like what your team is working through, reach out and let's find the gap together.