What makes strategic plans fail

How many times have you heard the word strategy in your career? More than you can count, I'm guessing. Strategy, "they" say, is what you need to get from Point A to Point B. But one of the most common complaints we hear from executives in big and small companies is that their strategic plans break down somewhere in the execution. According to a survey , an overwhelming 74 percent of executives don't have faith that their company's transformative strategies will succeed. Many studies have concluded that the vast majority of strategic planning fails, up to 67 percent actually.

In part, it's because the traditional way of thinking about strategic planning is totally backward. Strategic planning was initially invented to provide a step-by-step plan to managers and doers within businesses to ensure they get it right. But, it turns out, giving someone a plan is far less effective than aligning your team on a vision or endpoint -- meaning, getting people clear on where they need to go as the starting point.

That's the difference between strategic planning analysis and strategic thinking synthesis. Businesses grow, they shrink, and they evolve over time. What does that scream about the value of the strategy? Related: 5 Steps to Better Employee Communications. Leadership Which brings us to leadership, which was the fifth most popular category. Not all management teams are blessed with skilled leaders.

It seems that many of our strategic planning sessions stop halfway, before there is a plan. Inquiring minds want to know what a strategy document is really for. Instead, I suggest that implementing strategic plans is more like keeping plates spinning atop a number of pointed sticks.

Notice the subtle difference here from leadership. While leadership is expected to communicate the vision and support it with demonstrable actions, management is expected to know how to execute the individual tactics.

Most fail because they assume their team has the wherewithal to pull it off and they therefore do not manage the process. Motivation and Personal Ownership Our last category is actually our first category. In other words, they want to show up for more than just a paycheck.

So for a strategic plan to work, you have to somehow build into that process a mechanism for reviewing and adapting the plan as circumstances change. The key to making strategic planning work is to think about it as being three distinct phases. Who are our customers?

What do they want from us? What do they get from us? What matters most to us? What are the values that we want to drive the way we do our business? Where do we see our company going in the future? At the beginning of the strategic planning process, people need the opportunity to deliberately and thoughtfully think about how to respond to those questions.

The second phase is long-range planning. Instead of being intuitive, it becomes very analytical. It also includes understanding the regulatory environment, where technology is taking you, and how major trends affect you.

Below I've pulled together my top 5 reasons why some create value and others create wastepaper. Insight: Firms seldom achieve the expected results of their strategic plans because of not knowing how to execute them effectively. Here are some of the key reasons why most companies are unable to follow through their strategic plans:.

Many companies set unrealistic goals and lack a clear focus on their goals and objectives. Without a strategic focus, there is no clear measure of success or growth. You can lose out on valuable time and waste critical resources.

This can be done best through filling out a strategic radar. A strategic radar provides you with a single-page view of your external and internal opportunities and challenges, which is important to adequately give you the information and the context you need to understand where you are versus where you need to be.

If you find that they are unable to communicate it to you clearly, chances are, they are not at all on board with what it is or are unsure about what you are trying to achieve.