Tired of Hearing How Strategic Plans Fail? Here’s How to Succeed

You’ve likely heard the well-known statistic that 90% of strategic plans fail. It’s easy to believe the fault lies with a poorly designed plan or strategy, but even 67% of well-formulated strategies fail, due to poor execution. Our managing director Craig Catley recently wrote about this issue for the business publication Spiceworks, diving deeper into why these failures are so common.

Failed strategic plans often share a root cause: an inability to plan outside present circumstances. Even seasoned executives can get caught in the trap of believing that the current state of the business, the wider industry, or the macroeconomic environment will stay the same. Unfortunately, nothing is static, and a plan that can’t contract and expand to address shifting circumstances is doomed to disappoint.

In the article, Craig briefly touches on three areas necessary to not only create, but execute, a successful strategic plan. Here we break them down in greater detail and share how StrategyBlocks effectively addresses each one.

Reconsider Timing

Old school wisdom told us that strategy planning is a once-yearly activity. Some companies even considered strategy a long-term exercise – revisiting it only every 5 or 10 years. In the world we live in today, that is simply impossible. So many things that impact your business now shift on a dime – strategy review and planning have to be an ongoing part of your routine activity.

StrategyBlocks was built with this idea in mind. Every aspect of the platform, from the visual nature, the ease of reporting and the focus on communication encourages ongoing engagement with your strategic plan.

When you are able to communicate strategy effectively internally, it more easily becomes part of your ongoing business activity. Not only are employees better aware of strategic goals, but they also have a clear line of sight for their own roles, expectations and how best to spend their time. Using a tool like StrategyBlocks helps you to prioritize the most important aspects of your strategic plan while also making it easy to visualize success along the path. Each smaller win leads to bigger wins, and is one of the fastest ways we’ve found to encourage your entire team to take the strategic plan seriously. 

Embrace flexibility

As Craig makes note of in his Spiceworks article, pivoting quickly is no longer a luxury but a necessity. In all ways of doing business, agility is a critical component. Market conditions shift, customer preferences change and outside forces – many of which have nothing to do with your business – wreak havoc on your planning—everything from natural disasters to political and social upheaval to the latest trending topic. We live in a time period marked by incessant change.

This is why clients love our highly visual approach to strategy mapping and monitoring. The cascading blocks system is a unique and effective way to see in real-time how strategy is impacting the organization. It is also easy to change and adapt quickly as needed, drilling down to specific areas without having to disrupt the whole plan. We’ve purposefully designed a system that can be easily added to as the strategy grows, or easily edited as the strategy changes. Meanwhile, the visual format makes it clear who owns what.

The cascading blocks approach also is an easy way to highlight both the current health of your strategic plan and potential risks. Our tool considers both structured and subjective data when evaluating risk, and our strategic health function goes beyond just KPI performance to also evaluate progress toward goals, an important identifier in understanding future strategic success. When a company can more readily evaluate the health of its strategy and the potential risks it is facing, it is much easier to approach an agile mindset with confidence.

Engage everyone

We launched StrategyBlocks 6 earlier this year, and one of the most popular features of our new platform is StrategyBlocks Ideas. Ideas allows all users to more easily share their thoughts for strategic improvements with the entire team. What’s more, you can follow other team members’ Ideas and their progress, compare different Ideas and approve Ideas for integration into the broader strategic plan. Essentially, Ideas was designed to leverage the strengths of the entire team, help distribute ownership across the company and allow everyone to better share in success.

The COVID-19 pandemic had an interesting long-term effect on employees in the workplace, namely, the realization that they want to feel engaged and purposeful in their work. Communication is a big part of this, communication that flows freely in every direction. Research from McKinsey shows that while 70% of employees see their purpose as defined by their work, when asked if they are living their purpose in their day-to-day work, only 15% of frontline managers and employees said they were. Contrast that with the 85% of executives and upper management who do believe they are living their purpose in the workplace, and you see there is a significant disconnect. We have seen time and again how that gap closes when employees are able to contribute and use the insights they have from the work they do to improve the company.

It’s not enough to desire that employees engage more, there needs to be a formalized system that allows them to see the fruits of their efforts. That’s why we designed StrategyBlocks Ideas to easily integrate with existing block scheduling features, allowing users to efficiently estimate project duration, allocate workload based on availability and manage the delivery schedule in an intuitive, visually compelling way.

Every business strategy is created with the goal of being successful. Meeting that goal, however, takes additional effort. By incorporating employees of every level in the process, utilizing tools that allow you to be agile and make changes when needed, and revisiting your progress on an ongoing basis, you help safeguard both your strategy and your success.