Why most strategic plans die in a drawer

Almost every company has a strategic plan. Some even have a very good one: with its market analysis, its three-year objectives and an impeccable presentation. It’s presented in January, applauded and filed away.

By March nobody remembers it. By June, day-to-day work has swallowed it. And in December another one gets written.

The problem is almost never the plan. It’s what happens afterwards.

How a plan dies

After many years of seeing plans, I’ve learnt that they almost always die for the same reasons:

• It’s one person’s plan. The managing director writes it, or a consultancy does, and the team receives it as an assignment. Nobody feels it’s theirs.
• It has too many objectives. Twelve priorities aren’t priorities. They’re a wish list.
• It doesn’t come down to the week. There are annual objectives, but nobody knows what they have to do on Monday to move closer to them.
• Nobody reviews it. If there’s no fixed meeting to look at how we’re doing, the plan disappears from the agenda.
• It changes every few weeks. Constant changes of criteria in the middle of execution wear the team out and teach them that the effort isn’t worth it.

If you recognise yourself in two or more of these, your plan is in danger.

What I learnt when I stopped doing it myself

For years, I drew up the strategic plan and the annual budget myself. It was what I found hardest to let go of. When I finally delegated it to the general manager, the sales director and the finance director, they did it better than me.

And not only that: they delivered it. Because it was their plan. They’d debated every objective, they knew where every figure came from and they’d committed to it in front of the others.

That’s the first lesson: a plan gets delivered when it’s written by the people who have to carry it out.

My three rules to stop a plan ending up in the drawer

1. Few objectives, each with a figure and an owner. Three objectives for the year. Not ten. Each with a figure, a date and a person responsible. If it can’t be measured, it isn’t an objective; it’s an intention.

2. Every objective comes down to 90 days, and from there to the week. A year is too long for people to organise themselves. Ninety days isn’t. Each objective becomes a few initiatives for the next quarter, and each initiative becomes what, who, when and how.

3. It’s reviewed with discipline. A short weekly meeting for commitments and blockers, and a monthly review of the numbers. At every review, each initiative has three options: carry on, change or stop. But the decision is made with data, not on impulse.

The plan and the method

A good plan without method is a document. A method without a plan is activity without direction. You need both.

And you need something else, which is the scarcest thing of all: someone who makes sure the pace isn’t lost. That the plan is looked at every week, that every commitment is followed up and that nobody reopens the debate every time something gets complicated.

That’s exactly what I do in the ON90 programme. I don’t hand you a plan and leave. We build it with your team, break it down into 90 days and I stay on to make sure it happens: between 4 and 8 hours a week with you. Because what I sell isn’t knowledge. It’s making things happen.

The Monday test

Here’s a very simple test. Ask three people on your leadership team, separately: “What are the company’s three objectives this year, and what are you going to do this week to move us closer to them?”

If all three answers match and are specific, your plan is alive. If not, you know where it is: in the drawer.

The ON 90-day plan helps you break each objective down into initiatives with an owner, a date and an indicator. And if you’d like us to do it together, here’s how ON90 works.