Strategic planning pitfalls

Most AEC strategic plans fail not from bad ideas, but from misalignment, weak accountability, ignored culture, and lack of execution discipline.

Strategic planning is a critical aspect for every successful business, yet a variety of common strategic planning pitfalls often prevent plans from succeeding. While some obstacles can be easily fixed, others require intentional effort and even cultural change to ensure your AEC strategic planning efforts deliver long-term value.

Here are 10 of the most common reasons strategic plans fail, along with ideas to prevent them:

1. Not having the right people participating in planning. Strategic planning should not occur in a vacuum, yet sometimes it is limited to board members, the C-suite, or firm leadership. These are all critical voices for the plan; however, there needs to be a more global view of the firm represented. Does marketing and business development have a voice? What about human resources? Or information technology?
   Furthermore, it is always good to engage next-generation leadership, as individuals at this level will likely be responsible for much of the plan’s implementation. Their buy-in is critical, so they need to have a voice when priorities, objectives, and strategies are set. They are also often the conduit to creating firm-wide buy-in as they communicate the plan to other levels of the organization.
2. Lack of leadership alignment. One of the cautions we always raise at the beginning of any strategic planning workshop is that there can absolutely be no “meeting after the meeting.” This is when a small group of participants gets together and says, “That will never work!” Those comments are a major iceberg that can sink the plan quickly.
   Strategic planning must always be conducted in a safe space where people are comfortable speaking their minds, challenging assumptions, and suggesting totally new or innovative ideas without fear of repercussion.
   One of the challenges we encounter is that strategic planning participants often represent the interests of their team or function within the firm and do not think globally about the company when setting goals. Their internal team may not be fully aligned with the overall corporate vision, and thus, they are not aligned with the direction a plan may be taking.
   We’ve experienced strategic plans in which people who should be sharing their ideas end up shutting down. While any good facilitator will try to pull conversations out of these individuals, the reality is that sometimes they don’t want their voice heard – choosing to ignore the plan or the group’s consensus. Leadership must be aligned during and after the planning process; otherwise, the odds of the plan’s success drop substantially.
3. Lack of accountability. Every plan should have SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, and include assigning accountability and responsibility. One person is accountable for each goal; the buck stops with them. Responsibility can be assigned to multiple people, so it is essential to identify the accountable individual for every goal.
   Only half of the participants in our recent Stambaugh Ness Strategic Planning Survey identified that employees are held accountable for the assigned components of their strategic plan. And yet, when we asked if raises, bonuses, and promotions should be tied to strategic planning performance, an overwhelming 91% of respondents selected "yes." So there is a disconnect between understanding the importance of accountability and those firms actually implementing it.
4. Underestimating company culture. As business guru Peter Drucker once opined, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Strategic plans must consider company culture as priorities are identified, and objectives/strategies are developed. Some firms have lofty goals, yet the current culture may not allow those goals to become a reality.
   When that is the case, it makes sense to get a feel for the culture, identify problem areas, and seek to correct them before moving forward with certain goals. Sometimes the cultural challenges don’t surface until the strategic planning process is underway, and the process needs to pivot – either through a planning pause to dig deeper into the cultural challenges or through a strategic initiative to understand and address company culture.
5. Not engaging staff at different levels. A sure-fire way to derail a strategic plan is to create it in the ivory tower and then tell staff to “go make this happen.” Just as it is important to have a diverse group participating in planning – emerging leaders, administrative functions, etc. – it is also important to solicit input from a variety of voices during plan development.
   At SN, we’re fans of the strategic planning team developing the strategic priorities and then pulling together teams to create objectives and strategies. Broaden the base of staff involved with strategic planning, and not only will there be more buy-in, but the myriad viewpoints may take you down paths you never thought of – to the betterment of the company.
6. Creating overly complex or overly generic plans. These two challenges may be at opposite ends of the spectrum, but they lead to the same outcome: confusion. Clarity is key to successful strategic plans. When these plans have too many wheels in motion – often in too short a time frame – the components may end up cannibalizing themselves as the different initiatives, objectives, and strategies “fight” for attention, while confusing those accountable for their execution.
   A lack of understanding of plan intent applies not only to highly complex plans but also to generic plans that seem to apply to any company, anywhere (even in other industries). Improving recruiting or elevating marketing may be ideal outcomes, but they are merely hollow goals without meaningful actions. Furthermore, vague or generic plans fail to inspire staff, whether they are simply learning about the plan or assigned implementation components of the plan.
7. Lack of resources to achieve goals. As Mike Tyson so eloquently stated, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” And the punch in the face for the strategic planning is often the lack of available resources. Firms are still extremely busy and facing staffing shortages, which will only get worse in the coming years, as birth rates and college enrollment decline. Beyond the human resources required to succeed, companies often do not effectively budget the financial resources needed to advance a plan.
   Once initiatives have been established, objectives and strategies must not only align with those initiatives but also be feasible. Sometimes this may mean moving timeframes further out to account for workload. Other times, this requires upfront budgeting to get a rough order-of-magnitude cost estimate and understand what will really be required.
   It is certainly acceptable to move the goalposts for specific objectives and strategies – or to include a strategy of soliciting pricing for certain goals – but this must all be done with the intention of better understanding the resource commitment required.
8. No measurement/adjustment. By definition, a SMART goal must be measurable; it’s why it is so important to have SMART goals in your strategic plan. Measurement may be based on percentage complete, financial metrics, or other performance indicators, but they are very important to your plan.
   If you have no way to measure how you are doing, how can you drive accountability or truly understand how execution is going? Measurements serve as a report card on the progress and success of strategic planning.
9. Spending too much time on the urgent. The Eisenhower Matrix is a simple four-quadrant matrix with Urgent/Important, Not Urgent/Important, Urgent/Not Important, Not Urgent/Not Important. It is an excellent tool for personal time management and corporate prioritization. Most of the content in a strategic plan falls into the Not Urgent/Important quadrant. And then it remains there and flounders, withering on the vine.
   Strategic planning is essential to a company’s future, so it cannot be neglected. This is why the Time-Bound component is such an important element of the SMART goal framework. In most cases, a quarterly timeframe goal (as opposed to a specific date) is appropriate for a strategic plan, as it allows some element of flexibility based upon workload and external issues. However, Not Urgent/Important and Never Gets Done are not synonymous.
10. Failing to name and address the elephants. We all know about the elephants in the room, and we’ve unfortunately experienced this too often in strategic planning. Ever since becoming a strategic planning consultant, I’ve shared ground rules at the start of a planning workshop (aka, retreat). They include instructions like “speak now or forever hold your peace,” “it is OK to disagree,” “everyone has a voice,” and “there will be no meeting after the meeting.”
    Addressing any elephants is another ground rule. Sadly, sometimes we don’t learn about any elephants until it’s too late in the process. Confidential discovery interviews help us understand most of the elephants upfront, but some people choose to hold them too closely. An example of this we’ve observed several times over the years is when planning participants hold their opinions out of respect for outgoing leaders, not wanting to upset them. Or when there is not just a meeting after the meeting (where someone says, “that will never work”), but a meeting-within-a-meeting: participants quietly texting one another under the table, disagreeing privately but not speaking up.
    Always acknowledge and address the elephants, or don’t waste your time and energy on strategic planning. You have major cultural issues to fix first.

Bonus: Creating goals without a roadmap

Although this has somewhat been addressed above with the importance of strategic initiatives or priorities being the destination, and objectives and strategies being the roadmap, the reality is that far too many “strategic plans” are neither strategic nor tactical, but rather simply bullet lists of wishes.

It’s great that you want to double your revenue or improve your hit rate by 10%, but if that plan does not address the “how,” you have a strategery document, not a strategic plan.

What are you planning to accomplish? Why is it essential (the relevance portion of the SMART framework)? How are you going to do it? The answers to these questions create the roadmap to get to your destination.

Strategic plans need to be living, breathing documents. Sometimes, strategic initiatives/priorities, objectives, or strategies that made sense when the plan was developed no longer make sense. Things change, but this doesn’t mean that the plan has failed. Always be ready to pivot – that happens on your projects all the time, so a strategic plan should be no different.

However, allowing the items listed above to occur may amount to intentional negligence or “planslaughter.” Strategic planning, when done correctly, is not a cheap endeavor – and this isn’t a reference to the cost of bringing in a consultant, but rather the many hours required to develop, implement, monitor, and update a strategic plan. The opportunity costs may be extremely high, as your team could be billing clients or doing something else of higher value to the firm if you’re not taking the strategic plan seriously.

Are you ready to get serious about strategic planning? Or do you have other examples of planning malfeasance to share? Let’s connect!

Scott D. Butcher, FSMPS, CPSM is managing director of Strategic Growth Advisory at Stambaugh Ness. Connect with him on LinkedIn.