What makes plans fail

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Product Tour Book a Demo. Try for free. How many times have you seen a strategic plan launch to great fanfare and optimism, only to be forgotten about within a few months? We're going to tell you some of the most common pitfalls we see as to why strategic plans fail, to help you ensure that your plan isn't one of them! You can't execute a strategy alone!

Indeed, as the owner of your strategic plan, you should really be one of the least important people when it comes to execution.

Because ideally you will keep yourself at arms-length from much of the delivery to allow you to retain perspective and a strategic lens. This only serves to heighten the important of team buy in. A common mistake here is to underestimate the size of your 'team' when in comes to having them buy in to the plan. If you have a team of 5, things are fairly easy - all 5 need to be bought in.

If you have a team of 50 - things get trickier. Often we see strategy leads doing a great job of gaining support from their immediate colleagues and direct reports, but a lousy job of ensuring that support cascades throughout the organization. If you only have buy in from 5 out of your 50 strong team, then either your strategy will fail through lack of resources - or worse, if it succeeds with that level of buy in, it probably means that it was nowhere near ambitious enough in the first place!

A lot of people assume that communication is a key part of this process - and of course they're right - but even before you get to the communication stage, you need to start gathering feedback and inviting contributions from your team into any new strategic plan.

Make sure that the first time your team hear about the plan isn't when it's finished! Use tools like surveys, meetings and face to face discussions to gather feedback from your whole organization on topics like:. Involving people as early as possible will make the next phase of the process communication go so much more smoothly! When it comes to that phase, the key is to communicate early and often. We often see plans kick off with a flurry of workshops and activity, only to see communication tail off rapidly as people return to business-as-usual activities.

Schedule in regular strategy sessions with your team, and stick to them. Failure to address a lack of buy in early is the single biggest reason why strategic plans fail! Strategic planning is both easy and hard. Coming up with ideas about what your organization needs to do and knowing how to do it aren't usually a problem - but clearly structured plans with well written objectives are much rarer than they should be! We've written an entire blog post on creating well crafted Strategic Objectives - you can also download our on the topic.

As such, I'll only cover the basics here. In our experience, well written objectives are those which:. By addressing these five obstacles, you can expect to more successfully implement the plans you devise and participate in, even if a past experience felt more like a do-it-yourself mugging.

Communications The number two response to our question about strategy failure should be familiar to all: Communications. Poor communications seems to take many forms.

Apparently, some groups like to develop strategic plans, and then hide them under a rock. Expectations and opinions are not shared openly, thoroughly, and effectively.

Other responses also indicate that lack of communications routinely allows plans to die out after their launch. Organizations become introverted in their communication strategies, whether the group is a large company or a small team. Communication is also much more than words and pictures. Communication is also delivered through demonstration.

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. When asked why, they said that they spent their entire budget and ran out of money. Other people confuse strategic planning with operational planning. That is, they focus on financial numbers, looking at what the numbers were for the past three years and then extrapolating from that.

As a result, the planning becomes just a matter of establishing financial targets and budgets into the future rather than having a dynamic debate about the larger strategic issues that could be impacting the organization in the future. Sometimes the strategic planning process becomes too political. As a result, the group cannot deal with the real issues at hand. When the process becomes too political and too driven by special interest, it breaks down.

They get the plan created and in a notebook, but they put it on the shelf and never look at it again. The plan never gets integrated throughout the organization. It may have been a great plan at the time it was created, but things change in the environment. The fact is that the strategy can be right today but wrong tomorrow because of external factors.

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.