Why Strategic Plans Fail

We've all seen it: the strategic plan buried in a desk drawer or collecting dust on the shelf. Here are four common reasons:

1. Lack of ownership by leaders and / or staff.

Diagnosis: Lack of ownership can be the result of a variety of factors. Perhaps the Executive Director has pushed the Board into a strategic planning effort that it wasn’t ready for, so the Board sees it as the Executive Director’s plan. Key leaders may previously have had a poor experience with strategic planning, so they have no confidence in the process or the product. One opinionated Board member may have dominated the process, leading others to discredit the outcome. If senior staff were excluded, then they may see the plan as strictly the province of the Board.

Rx: Identify a respected Board member who can champion the process along with the Executive Director. Engage the Board in a dialogue about strategic planning. Use a professional facilitator to assure objectivity in the process. Involve senior staff as full participants in the planning process.

2. Poor information led to faulty conclusions

Diagnosis: Good strategic planning is not a seat-of-the-pants endeavor. It requires reliable, objective information about the external environment, the needs of your members and the internal capabilities of your association. Having the Board get together over a weekend and make guesses about any of these areas is, at best, at waste of time.

Rx: Initiate an ongoing process of environmental scanning. (Check with the ASAE Foundation for how-to’s.) Regularly survey your members and feed that information into your planning process.

3. No meaningful performance measures

Diagnosis: Too many plans become laundry lists of activities without any discussion of what success will look like. While you don’t want to fall into the trap of just measuring the things that you can measure, you do want to know how you will evaluate the accomplishment of your objectives.

Rx: Determine how you will evaluate each objective in your plan and by what date. Write these performance measures into your plan and use them to gauge your progress at regular intervals.

4. No connection between the plan and the real-world activities of the association

Diagnosis: This most frequently occurs when the Board or designated Planning Committee does seek input from the membership and/or does not involve senior staff in the planning process. The result is a disconnect between how the association staff and committees are spending their time and the priorities the Board may have set in its planning process.

Rx: Obtain input from the membership through surveys or focus groups. Involve senior staff as full participants in the planning process. Be sure that, as part of the planning process, there is a review of current projects, services and activities. Do they help advance the priorities in the strategic plan? If not, they should be discontinued and those resources redirected to more relevant programs.