Happy Summer, 2019!
In this first week of July, I continue my summer series on the seven Clear Signals That Your Strategic Plan Is Going to Fail and what you can do about it.
You have created a strong team, held a very productive, off-site strategic planning session, documented all the ideas and plans, published the official “Strategic Plan” and told everyone about it at one of your Town Hall Meetings. And nothing is happening. Your strategic plan is heading for the pile of failed strategic plans and you have no idea why.
Mona Mitchell and I published our book “7 Elements of Strategy Execution” in mid-2019 as a response to many organizations’ struggle to bring strategy to reality. Forbes.com has been quoted to suggest that “over 60% of strategic plans fail in some way – and many of these never even get off the ground”.
Clear Signals That Your Strategic Plan Is Going to Fail #1 last week:
Your Leaders Cannot Articulate the Plan
This week: You do not have a scorecard for your plan.
When anyone on the team asks, “How are we doing”, they need a simple and straight answer. A scorecard will measure your progress in all the strategic areas of the plan and keep you, and everyone else, abreast of the state of the union.
Call it forced accountability. Create a system that will force you to measure your success and progress throughout the life cycle of the plan.
There are many examples of strategy scorecards out there. I like one from a software developer out of England called Intrafocus (www.intrafocus.com). Five very simple sections they suggest:
- Vision- to be clear where we are headed.
- Priorities – to be clear what is most important and what we need to focus on at any one time
- Objectives – more granular statements of the end goal
- Measures – the key component: where are we?
- Initiatives – the detailed project work that we need to work on
The result? Everyone knows where the organization is headed, what the game plan is, their part in it and how it is progressing.
Strategies fail for many reasons:
- poor communication
- lack of a scorecard
and more to come.
