Let's say you have 10 strategic objectives that make up your plan - at a minimum you should be celebrating every time you achieve one - even if that means once per month or more regularly. It doesn't have to be anything huge - it could be a team lunch, an early office departure on a Friday afternoon or maybe a reward monetary or otherwise. Don't be too finicky about 'who' gets to celebrate - this needs to be a whole-team celebration, even if one person or team did more than the rest.
Because the whole point of this article is that it is your team who will deliver your strategy, not one single person. There are undoubtedly a whole host of other reasons why strategic plans fail - but in our experience of working with hundreds of strategic plans, these are by far the most common - but thankfully, also the easiest to avoid!
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this list and your suggestions for additional pitfalls we can all strive to avoid. Get a demo of the 1 strategy software and ask questions of our strategy experts.
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Blog Get your strategy fix with our latest articles from our blog. Courses Learn from the best and brightest at Cascade and become a strategy expert. Product Hub. Take the Cascade personality test. Share this post:. Lack of buy in from the team You can't execute a strategy alone! Use tools like surveys, meetings and face to face discussions to gather feedback from your whole organization on topics like: - The organization's strengths and weaknesses - How they feel about the current Vision of the organization - Who they admire in the industry competitors and why Involving people as early as possible will make the next phase of the process communication go so much more smoothly!
Unclear Objectives Strategic planning is both easy and hard. In our experience, well written objectives are those which: - Have a clear link to the Vision of the organization - Contain a clear action a verb , a metric where possible, as well as a tightly defined window of execution a start and end date - Have a single owner or captain - others can collaborate of course, but a single owner avoids ambiguity - Are reported on a bare minimum of monthly at a regular strategy session or board meeting A good way to 'test' the clarity of your objectives is to ask various people throughout the organization whether they remember and can clearly articulate them - as well as clearly describe how their own work and tasks relate back to a given objective.
Failure to Account for Business as Usual Pragmatism is a key part of any successful plan. There are two ways that you can deal with this: Include BAU activities as part of your strategic plan. In theory, a well written plan with clear Focus Areas should encompass the vast majority of your BAU activities.
Managing clients and such-like may not form part of the high level organizational goals - but I'm pretty sure that 'Client Satisfaction' would. This is probably simpler than a but it does have some pitfalls attached. If you're not careful, you can end up creating a divide in your organization, with some individuals focused on BAU and others on strategic change.
This is in stark contrast to point number 1 - where I strongly argue that total buy in is key to successful execution! Loss of Momentum We've alluded to this already, but so often with strategic plans, we see a great deal of enthusiasm at the start of the process, followed by a gradual tailing off and return to business as usual. Delivering against all of the points above and below will help immensely in making sure this doesn't happen to you - but here are a few other tips you can employ to stop your plan falling into a black hole: Schedule regular 'Strategy Meetings' into the diary - ideally weekly.
Use the word Strategy in the meeting title - that way whenever anyone looks at their schedule for the week, they'll be reminded about the importance of delivering against the plan. Successful organizational members tend to leave an organization when they have to work for incompetent managers and feel that their performance is not appreciated or even worked against.
To increase the level of competence of organizational members several practices can be used such as training and education, coaching and counseling, giving feedback about performance, addressing poor performance, hiring and firing of organizational members and bringing in external expertise. A strategic vision describes the desired future state of the organization. The strategic vision helps clarify the direction in which an organization is to move Kotter, A clear and well-formulated strategic vision is a key requirement for effective organizational redesign Miles et al.
Without a clear strategic vision organizational members and other stakeholders lack a clear direction for the new strategy.
Managers and employees need to know that they have to achieve with respect to the strategy implementation. Therefore, the strategic vision needs to be clearly defined and well formulated Hussey, In addition, the strategic vision needs to be attractive and easy to communicate toward organizational members, customers, shareholders, and other relevant stakeholders.
The simpler the strategic vision is, the easier it is to understand and execute for organizational members. A clear and attractive strategic vision increases the confidence of employees in a successful outcome of a strategy implementation effort. However, not only must the vision be clear and attractive, it must also realistic and feasible. An unrealistic strategic vision reduces the motivation and commitment of organizational members.
A failure to think through the strategy makes it impossible to implement, except by chance Hussey, Not only needs a strategy be sound and feasible it needs to be clear also. Organizational members who have to implement the strategy need to have a clear understanding of the strategy. They need to understand what the operational objectives of the strategy implementation are and what the consequences are for them as individuals.
Furthermore, organizational members need to know what to do to make the strategy a success. Consequently, a strategy needs to be simple and focus on the essence of the strategy. When a strategy is clear and simple, it is easier to understand for organizational members. However, managers and executives have a tendency to keep the strategy rather vague allowing them to avoid criticism when the strategy proves unsuccessful. Vague strategies are often a natural outcome of policymaking processes in the public sector.
Strategies and policies are often developed in a way that reduces the level of clarity of the strategy or policy and makes implementation problematic Baier et al. The controlling body tends to consist of policy makers who often have different agendas, which are designed to benefit their own constituents, but not necessarily those of others in the controlling group Nutt, Therefore, there is a need to create coalitions with multiple and often competing objectives in order to agree on a certain policy Baumer, or strategy.
A common method for securing policy support is to increase the ambiguity of a proposed policy Page, The lack of clarity allows policy makers to show their constituents that they have successfully represented their interests Nutt, Thus, policy ambiguity is less the result of deficiencies of policy makers than a natural consequence of gaining the required support for the policy and of changing preferences over time ibid.
A strategic plan cannot be executed when it is not translated into operational terms Kaplan, Even the best strategy is worthless when managers cannot translate the strategy into operational reality. The strategy implementation plan specifies the processes, activities and operational objectives that are required to achieve the goals of the strategy.
The strategic objectives need to be translated into measurable operational implementation sub-objectives Reid, and linked to departmental and individual goals Kaplan, Measurable objectives provide an effective basis for management control of the implementation ibid.
A lack of clear strategy objectives contributes to strategy implementation failure. Without concrete objectives and milestones, it is impossible to measure the progress of the strategy implementation.
This makes managing and improving the strategy implementation impossible. Therefore, the implementation plan needs to contain a clear set of concrete and measurable objectives or targets.
Clear and specific tasks need to be defined which are required to achieve these targets. Everyone with strategy implementation responsibilities needs to know what to do in order to implement the strategy and what concrete objectives they have to attain. Unclear objectives leave room for differential interpretation and discretion and may thus contribute to implementation failure Barrett, Furthermore, effective strategy implementation requires clear implementation tasks, activities and responsibilities.
Implementation can only be successful when there is a clear and shared understanding of who does what, when, at what cost Allio, Not only should the necessary actions to implement the strategy be identified and planned, responsibility for these actions should be allocated as well Owen, By allocating clear responsibilities for the execution of the implementation activities, progress can be measured and controlled Reid, As we saw earlier, executives and managers have a tendency to keep a strategy rather vague and ambiguous.
Such an approach also has its advantages as plans are by their nature designed to promote inflexibility Mintzberg, However, vague strategies lead to vague strategic objectives. People need realistic challenges to perform well. Achieving alignment with all the critical stakeholders in your organisation not only gets you faster to where you need to be, but it also helps you paint a clear picture of what success looks like for everyone involved, thereby forcing you to come up with the best solutions and techniques to deal with critical problems and issues.
One of the key reasons why having a clear strategic focus is important is that it allows you to track and measure success. It is crucial for organisations to celebrate wins, no matter how little they may be. This gives teams the satisfaction that all their efforts have not been put to waste and that they are inching closer and closer to where they need to be, where the strategic plan is concerned.
More importantly, celebrating the small goals also gives you the opportunity to reinforce alignment on important goals and address any pressing issues and setbacks that may be stopping you from executing your plans from start to finish.
And by celebrating these successes along the way, you highlight the importance of strategy and its execution across the entire organisation, so everyone is ready to face the next challenge head on.
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