Why most strategic plans fail just as often as New Year’s resolutions

Strategic planning is a big business. Companies spend millions of dollars working with consulting firms to chart a path forward. Not only does a lot of money change hands as part of this process, but the amount of time that employees invest in working on the plan likely doubles the cost of the entire process.

In the end, leadership gets a shiny report they can send to employees, shareholders, external stakeholders, and others. Often, though, much less money and time is invested in implementing that plan than was spent creating it. As a result, there is a lot of cynicism around engaging in strategic plans.

In many ways, this feels a lot like New Year’s resolutions. With great fervor, people will identify a change they want to make in the new year. Now is the time to get physically fit, develop deeper relationships, or get an education. Yet, most people have abandoned their resolutions in a few weeks.

The central problem with strategic plans is in the name itself. Every organization needs to be concerned both with strategy and tactics. Strategy defines the north star for the organization. What are the big-picture elements you’re trying to accomplish? Tactics is the method for getting there. What specific steps are team members going to take on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis that will lead to the desired outcome. Ultimately, a strategy is unlikely to meet with success without a tactical plan to get there.

There are several things leaders can do to increase the chances of success for a strategic plan. In many ways, these mirror the steps people need to take to be better at achieving their New Year’s resolutions.

Focus on resources

A big part of the problem with the strategic planning process is that the focus is almost entirely on strategy instead of the resources needed to execute on it. Organizations take their plan and then develop other teams tasked with turning that plan into a reality.

This creates two central problems. There are inevitable tradeoffs that must be made to start to implement a plan, which dampens enthusiasm for the golden future the strategy promised. In addition, the resource (human, financial, and material) needed to implement the plan is rarely identified ahead of time, which leads to significant battles during implementation.

A planning process should put most of the effort into the tactical planning rather than the strategic planning. Responsibility for particular elements of the plan should be given to specific groups. Money needed to move the plan forward should be identified early. The new work to be done should not just be dumped on top of the existing load carried by employees. Instead, responsibilities must be shifted so that people in the organization have the time to make progress on the new work. Otherwise, the plan will fail.

Identify concrete steps

If an organization is going to do things differently in the future than it does in the present, people are going to have to engage in different actions than they were before. That means you need to know what people are doing now. How do the actions people take now move the organization’s mission forward? How can the elements of that mission that cannot be lost be integrated with tasks that will promote the new direction?

Much of the success of this planning process also requires thinking through the reward structure for employees. In any organization, there is what you say, what you do, and what you reward, and people listen to those in reverse order. What you reward is what drives a lot of daily behavior. So, if you want people to do something different tomorrow than they were doing today, you’re going to have to shift what people are rewarded for doing so that more of the actions related to the new goals is incorporated into the work day.

This kind of specific exploration of the work day is not nearly as much fun as envisioning a bright future, which is why strategic planning processes often kick that can down the road. But, this kind of detailed work is directly related to the likelihood of success of the plan.

Try, then adapt

As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” The other reason that the planning process is fun (albeit unproductive) is that it is blissfully unsullied by reality. It is impossible to envision the issues that will inevitably arise as you implement a plan.

Success at reaching a strategic goal is done in successive approximations. You try something, measure the outcomes, and then assess what is working and what is not. Keep what works, and fix what doesn’t. Ultimately, your plans are more like software than hardware. Hardware is as good as it will ever be when it comes out of the box. Software gets better by patching the bugs and adding new features. When you commit to continuous improvement of your tactical plans, you greatly improve the likelihood of reaching strategic aims.