9 Reasons Your Strategic Planning Process Fails

“We need a plan.”

That’s the right outlook, but many organizations say it without realizing how much work the strategic planning process takes. The effort pays off and will help your organization achieve its goals, but you may hit some bumps in the road if your process has gaps. Below are the main reasons the process fails, so you know what to avoid and how to course correct.

Mistake #1: The leadership team isn't bought in

If your leadership team doesn't support the strategic planning process, the rest of your organization won’t either. Your executives need to support and participate in the process, providing both resources and authority. Once people see buy-in at the top, everyone in the company will understand and commit to the importance of strategic planning. When a leadership team delegates strategic planning down to a manager or planning department, it’s doomed to fail, no matter how strong or effective the manager is.

Mistake #2: Key people are missing from the process

You want your leadership team bought in, but they shouldn’t be the only ones involved. You need people from all levels of the organization driving the strategic planning process. In an ideal world, your executives shape and communicate the overall picture of the process, while the people working closely with your customers provide insight into real-life pain points. The “war stories” from the front line (things like sales challenges, support issues, and operational hiccups) influence the planning direction and target height. Pulling in stakeholders from different departments will give you better insight into what’s feasible and effective.

Mistake #3: Your process and strategy aren't aligned

The word “process” can make people cringe, but only because too many organizations create one just for the sake of it, leaving you with a big, unwieldy operation that has lost its purpose. Your strategic planning process should always align with your strategy—period. This will take several gut checks. You may add steps that seem like good ideas at the outset, or that help you “cover your bases” by keeping everyone informed. If those steps veer away from what aids your strategy, you’re going in the wrong direction. If parts of your process aren’t aligned with strategy, remove or improve them to stay on track.

For example, we’ve seen a cumbersome review process that gave divisions and support units 48 hours to turn around feedback. This didn’t leave enough time for the leadership team to prepare for a strategy review and rendered those meetings ineffective. There are also cases where the data approval process is so slow that the data becomes out of date. If processes like these appear in your organization, rework them to support the strategy and reporting cadence.

The end goal for all strategic planning reports and meetings should tie to the organization's overall strategy. That keeps you aligned with the strategic goals and gets people excited that their work has a purpose and helps drive results.

Mistake #4: Communication is disjointed

If you’re dealing with version control issues, stakeholders who don’t know when their meetings are, data being pulled from unknown or unreliable sources, and similar challenges, then miscommunication could become your Achilles heel. Poor communication is one of the biggest reasons a strategic planning process breaks down. Make it part of your process to centralize information and standardize how it’s handled and presented. Since information and evaluations change over time, time stamp printed documents and establish one online location as the spot to get the most up-to-date information about your strategy.

You can also simplify communication with strategic planning software, which saves time and effort by letting you manage the entire process from a single system.

Mistake #5: There’s a lack of ownership

Every part of your strategy needs an owner. If you don't assign one, no one will take charge and make sure it gets done. That slows everything down and creates confusion about how it should work. Ideally, your organization assigns a point person to drive the entire strategic planning process and ensure key milestones are met, along with assigning owners to different parts of the strategy. The layers of responsibility will vary by organization, but the idea is to make sure someone is held accountable for each piece.

Mistake #6: Your data is in too many places

Your strategic planning process depends on accessible, accurate data. Maybe you don’t know where to find the information you need, or maybe data-entry errors are occurring because you’re copying and pasting information from different sources. When data is spread around the far reaches of your organization, the problems vary, but the result is always reports that take too long to create and charts with inconsistent formats. When your data is centralized, everyone references the same information, from the same source. Centralized data also lets you create report templates, define terms like “goal” so everyone is on the same page, and more. Your leadership team can compare data and make better decisions because the information is in one accessible place.

This doesn’t mean one ERP system should track all information, from finance and HR to operations, but rather that you should be able to communicate across systems. You need to have one source for your strategic information that’s populated by these other applications.

Mistake #7: The focus is on details (instead of decisions)

Some teams spend every strategy meeting talking about which data to show on charts and how to format them. If your meetings go to debating reporting details instead of discussing strategic information, your focus is in the wrong place. You can solve this issue by defining the goals of the measure being reported on and then creating report templates and standard charts. Your leadership team will know exactly what they’re looking at, and will use their meetings to make decisions about how to accomplish the goals and execute strategy.

Put rules in place to discuss changes to the source data or chart structure before strategy meetings. These meetings are for interpreting the data: what’s causing the underperformance and what you’re going to do about it.

Mistake #8: Reports are inconsistent

As we hinted at in #6 and #7, inconsistent reporting can be a major downfall of strategic planning processes. When reports are created in different layouts each month, people spend time looking for information instead of analyzing it. Think of the Paradox of Choice social theory: when you have too many decisions to make, it’s stressful. Eliminate as many “choices” as possible to reduce anxiety and remain focused on the most important things. In the case of strategy reports, the more inconsequential “choices” are the colors, layouts, definitions, and data points being presented. Decide on all of those items ahead of time to create consistent reports that your leadership team can use to make strategic decisions.

Mistake #9: The process itself isn't reviewed

Things change. Expect it and prepare for it. As your organization grows and evolves, your processes should as well. Even if you’ve established the perfect strategic planning process, continually review it to make sure it’s still working. Typically, organizations review their reporting structure and frequency on an annual basis. But there may be cases where you’d review it prior to the annual update, such as if you’re a municipality that just collected citizen satisfaction surveys or a for-profit that needs to accommodate new federal regulations. Don't be afraid to make changes if there's a better (or easier) way to do something.

Creating a strategic planning process is hard, which is why many organizations have trouble with it. If you’re facing challenges, you can turn it around by addressing these nine issues. Software won’t solve every problem, but tools like ClearPoint can help you establish accountability, improve communication, consolidate data, and build consistent reports. That structure lets you focus on the strategy itself.