Execution Velocity as Competitive Differentiator: What the Research Shows

The Research Question

What is the measurable performance gap between high- and low-velocity enterprises, and what organisational factors explain it? Is execution speed a capability that can be designed into an operating model, or does it remain situational?

Key Findings

• PMI's 2025 Pulse of the Profession research finds that high-performing organisations (top quartile by project success rate) complete strategic initiatives 2.5x faster than low-performing peers, while spending 13 times less money on rework and project failure recovery.
• McKinsey research on organisational velocity finds a 30% operating margin differential between the fastest and slowest quartile of firms in the same sector, attributing the gap primarily to decision-making speed at the middle management layer rather than executive or frontline level.
• BCG's analysis of 1,800 companies finds that organisations in the top quartile of "decision agility" (the speed and quality of decisions made under uncertainty) grow revenues 5.5 times faster than those in the bottom quartile over a five-year horizon.
• Bain and Company research identifies "strategic agility premium", the additional return generated by firms able to pivot investment allocation in response to market signals within a quarter, as the primary differentiator between transformation leaders and laggards across sectors.

The Analysis

The research consistently points to the same root cause. The McKinsey finding that the velocity gap lives at the middle management layer is particularly significant: it suggests that bottlenecks are structural rather than cultural. Middle management layers that were designed for control and reporting, not for decision delegation and rapid resource reallocation, slow the organisation at exactly the point where translation between strategy and execution happens. The D4 (Digital Transformation 2.0) lens captures this: DT2.0 is not a one-time programme but a continuous redesign of the operating model; execution velocity is an emergent property of how well that redesign has embedded speed as a structural feature rather than a situational response.