"Why Do Strategic Plans Fail?"

I was giving a presentation recently and, while fielding questions at the end, one of the participants asked me why I thought so many strategic plans fail.

It was an interesting question. Organizational idiosyncracies are a necessary component of analyzing the success of strategic plan implementation, but there are common identifiable factors that affect strategic planning outcomes.

First, what is success? And, for that matter, what is failure? Success and failure can be arbitrary and subjective assessments if the plan does not clearly define what success looks like. Specific, quantifiable, and achievable goals must be part of a strategic plan…and there must be realistic timelines associated with those goals. For example, to say “ABC Charity will grow its revenue by 10% in year 1 and 20% in year 2” may set the organization up to miss its targets before implementation even starts. What are the steps that need to take place to grow revenue? What are the barriers to revenue growth? Perhaps an identified barrier is an aging and stagnant individual donor base. A realistic measurable in year one might be the addition of 100 new contacts to the donor base, with no realization of revenue from those new additions expected until year 2. Being clear about projected outcomes, and the sequence in which they are expected to materialize, is necessary to ensure more objective and achievable measures of success.

Given more time, I could have spent some time unpacking what the gentleman meant by the word “fail”. I suspect what he was really getting at is “Why are so many strategic plans not fully implemented?”. Why do so many end up in a filing cabinet as historical reference for the next consultant?

Here’s our condensed attempt at an answer.

1. Ownership. It should be identified from the minute the decision is made to develop a strategic plan who will own the plan. A comprehensive strategic plan will likely engage all areas of the organization, so task ownership may be held by many individuals. But who owns the plan overall? Who will make sure it is sitting beside all of the key players as reference material at meetings? Who will ask the question of each Board decision: “How does this fit in with our strategic plan?” A champion of the plan has to be designated and can be one individual, a committee, or the Board as a whole.

Assignment of task ownership is also imperative: people must understand their roles and the timelines to which they will be held in completing tasks/activities. The plan champion has to be willing to hold individuals accountable for the pieces they own and be diligent about meeting timelines, and/or tracking progress when timelines need to be altered. In the absence of designated ownership/championing, Boards may assume that the ED/Management is monitoring development, while the ED may see strategic planning oversight as part of due diligence of the Board, for example. Assigning responsibility for plan oversight is a critical first step.

2. Practicality. You may have heard us say this before: a strategic plan must be rooted in a) a supportive macro-environment; and b) available organizational resources. Strategic planning contains elements of visioning, but it is not the same thing as visioning. It considers the ideal conditions that the organization would like to achieve, but plans for the steps required to get there in realistic ways: based on the human, time, and financial resources that the organization has available, and supported by trends in the environment in which the organization operates. You must fully research and understand organizational capacity as well as external factors affecting organizational development in order to develop an achievable strategic plan.

Practicality also means that implementation steps are a critical and fundamental component of the plan. In fact, we would argue, implementation should be where most of the plan is focused. If we’re answering the question “Why do so many strategic plans fail?”, we’d have to highlight that people seem to get excited about objective-setting: setting new goals, righting organizational wrongs, imagining change. But, in all of that excitement and goal-setting, it’s imperative to ask the questions: “Do we have the capacity to do that?” and “How do we do that?”. Or more specifically, “How do we do that and continue to deliver our core programs and services?”. Understanding and being diligent about laying out a clear implementation work plan and then effectively overseeing that work plan is critical to strategic planning success.

3. Simplicity. An effective strategic plan will be understood and achieve buy-in from stakeholders across the organization. It should be a clear, easy-to-follow path moving the organization towards its stated objectives. I have seen some complex strategic planning grids that, after a decade as a consultant, I couldn’t de-code, which left me wondering how busy people with overloaded plates in the organization found the time to translate these grids into practical organizational tasks and outcomes. In its simplest form, a strategic plan identifies an objective, outlines the tasks and activities required to get there, and assigns responsibility, timelines, and required resources to those tasks. If strategic planning is de-mystified and understood as a clear and concise map toward organizational goals, then buy-in, implementation, and outcome measurement will be much easier to achieve.

4. Consistency. This is a bit of a throw-back to item #1, but we’ve often heard that the transitional nature of Boards (and sometimes staff turnover) is a barrier to strategic plan implementation. The strategic plan must become a standard piece that transcends personnel change by ingraining it into meeting procedures and decision-making protocols. When working off an active strategic plan, it is useful to have an update on the plan as a standing Board agenda item or, minimally, as a standing report bi-monthly or quarterly. Where plan ownership has been established (as per #1), new staff and Board members should be oriented by the plan champion to use the strategic plan as a decision-making benchmark. Repetition forms habit and by ingraining the strategic plan into procedures and protocols, it will become a default point-of-reference.

The above list certainly isn’t exhaustive because organizations are dynamic…constantly changing and evolving, so the relationships, forces, and issues facing them necessarily contain an element of unpredictability that impacts organizational strategy. But plans that demonstrate clear ownership, practicality, simplicity, and consistency in their implementation – with a clearly laid path to identified and achievable outcomes – will unquestionably produce greater rates of success: whatever success is defined to be.