Six Reasons Strategic Plans Fail

Is Your Plan At Risk?

Every new calendar year typically comes with a comprehensive review of your strategic plan. The review intends to ensure the strategies and tactics selected are still the best choices moving forward and ensure the organization's action plans are designed to deliver against those choices.

Choice is the most challenging aspect of a strategic plan. Too many finished plans are simply a hodgepodge list of what can be done, not necessarily a thought-through and prioritized list of what should be done.

6 Watch-Outs

Six things to consider as you go through your strategic planning exercise.

Prioritization – Poor prioritization is a killer. You are doomed before you even start if you cannot clearly define the priorities for your organization’s success. Effective prioritization requires bringing the resources required to complete critical path tasks on time and in the appropriate sequence. This is where using a project planning software tool can be exceptionally helpful (as long as the tool isn’t too complicated and too hard to learn). Frequent and truthful communication between members of your organization is important. I added the word ‘truthful’ because it has been my experience that people tend to be reluctant to ask for help and as a consequence may be over-optimistic in their ability to hit the performance milestones. This behavior results in project crises that are often tough to manage and would have been averted if communication was objective.

Level of Detail – The worst strategic plans are those that remain on a shelf and have no impact on the day-to-day investment choices. Good strategic plans have sufficient detail that you can objectively evaluate progress and probability of success. They answer two fundamental questions – 1) Where should we play? and 2) How will we win? The objectives and strategies chosen need to be expressed numerically as well through goals and measures respectively.

Alignment between Strategies and Culture – Choices that may be effective, but are counter-culture, will never be properly executed and as a consequence will be the weak link in your strategic plan’s ability to deliver desired results. Communication is a vital element when a cultural change is required for success. You may want to use a model called “The Cultural Web” to peel the onion back and understand why your organization does what it does. A quick internet search will yield 2 million references to this model. Armed with insight from this kind of assessment, you can create a management approach to help the people in your organization step outside their comfort zones and dramatically improve the odds of success that they will deliver the results you need.

Accountability – Strategic plans need to be thought through to the Action Plan level. It is important to know who is going to do what by when. Team members need to hold each other accountable for delivering quality work. Single-point accountability that comes with +/- consequences helps avoid the pointing fingers syndrome that is not helpful to team cohesiveness and ultimately increases the risk of failure. It has been my experience that investing time to discuss who is accountable for what helps establish proper expectations. It also allows people to share concerns regarding their ability and/or resources to deliver the results required for success. It is so much easier to address shortages in these areas up-front rather than in process. It also gives you a chance to make changes to the strategic plan if something you thought was possible turns out not to be probable after deeper discussion.

Transparency in Decision Making – No plan is ever exactly right when it is authored. All plans are created with a forecast of future events and need to be flexible enough to be altered as things change. Alterations may have impacts on cost, timing, and/or level of achievement. Many times these decisions need to be made by organization leaders rather than team members. As a Marketing Director, one of my greatest frustrations was when a team excluded me from making project decisions that I could have materially impacted either by my personal experience or the ability of my level to access resources they assumed were simply out-of-reach. Many times, organizational policies may be involved and failure to have the right person in your organization make the decision creates political or legal risk. One of my favorite models to ensure transparency in decision-making is the RACI Model. An online search will return over 10 million articles on this model. I encourage you to scan at least one because I think you will find the model exceptionally useful.

Clarity of Goals and Strategies – There is a skill to authoring goals and strategies that are easy to understand by everybody in the organization. Even if a strategic choice is right, if people have multiple interpretations of what it really means there will be multiple directions to the actual execution. Often, this means well-intended people will create execution chaos and yet feel like they are doing things correctly. This results in inefficiency and risks the on-time under-budget achievement of the goal. One of the most frequently used tools for creating measures is George Doran’s SMART model. An online search of this term will result in over 3 million references.

Discussion

Here is an immutable truth - strategic plans are only effective if they are actually used. Too often the strategic planning process becomes an annual right of passage, but once the document is aligned it gets put in a file and is not routinely visited. A colleague of mine once said strategic planning is worthless because it is hard enough to forecast what will happen tomorrow let alone years from now. On one level he is right. If a strategic plan is created and not visited frequently or used to guide investment choices, it is useless. But, a strategic plan (like any map) is intended to be used and adjusted if things change. When this doesn’t happen, the problem isn’t necessarily with the Plan, but rather with the deployment process. The other big challenge in small organizations is the feeling they can operate without a strategic plan, or that the time it takes to create one is a waste. I strongly believe otherwise. It has been my experience, that regardless of the size of an organization, it is cheaper and better to fail on paper than in the market.