When a Deadline Becomes the Strategy: All Time Strategy Trap Fail #3

October 1, 2013, was supposed to be a historic day.

Healthcare.gov would open its digital doors and allow millions of Americans to enroll in affordable health plans.

The policy was law. The demand was real. The deadline was immovable.

The site went live.

And it crashed almost immediately.

On day one, only six people nationwide successfully enrolled.

Six. Nationwide.

The Vision Made Sense

The goal wasn’t the problem.

Healthcare reform had passed. The enrollment window was set. Millions of people needed coverage.

All that remained was execution. And execution at this scale is never just about “building a website.” It’s about coordinating dozens of systems into one experience that actually works.

That’s where things began to break down.

The Trap: No One Owned the Whole

Behind the scenes, more than fifty contractors were building pieces of Healthcare.gov. Each team owned a part. No one truly owned the whole.

There was no single integrator with the authority to:

• see the end-to-end user experience

• manage dependencies across vendors

• force tradeoffs when things conflicted

• or delay launch if the system wasn’t ready

Integration testing was limited. Dependencies piled up. Risk accumulated quietly.

By the time problems became obvious, the calendar was driving decisions instead of the system.

How the Six Cs Would Have Helped

In my book, The Strategy Trap, I introduce a system called the Six Cs —the execution conditions teams need to turn ambition into results.

Healthcare.gov didn’t fail because the vision was wrong.

It failed because key execution conditions weren’t in place.

Two stand out.

Coordination

Coordination is about clear ownership of decisions and dependencies. It would have meant appointing a single integrator —one person accountable for how all the pieces fit together.

Not just reporting status. Actually owning whether the system worked as a system.

Without that role, dozens of “working parts” never became a working whole.

Clarity

Clarity is about defining success completely.

At Healthcare.gov, the launch date became the primary definition of success.

But it was never the complete definition.

For policy leaders, success meant launching on October 1.

For engineers, success meant a system that worked end-to-end at scale.

For contractors, success meant delivering their assigned components.

All of those definitions were valid.

They just weren’t reconciled.

True Clarity would have forced the full definition of success into the open:

• What must work on day one?

• What can fail gracefully?

• What conditions must be true before we launch — regardless of the date?

Instead, a date reigned supreme.

And execution followed that incomplete definition.

The Lesson

A collection of working parts does not make a working system.

And a deadline is a constraint not a definition of success.

Ask yourself:

Have we clearly defined what success actually means, and aligned everyone to that definition before execution begins?

Master the Six Cs

These stories are the warning signs.

The solution is the system.

You can learn how to apply Co-creation, Capacity, Clarity, Communication, Coordination, and Coaching in my upcoming book, The Strategy Trap.

Pre-order at TheStrategyTrap.com.

Next up: Failure #2 — a rock star who became a cautionary tale