Strategic Planning (pitfalls)

Introduction

Strategic planning
"....is frequently too siloed and bureaucratic. It can violate all known leading change principles; employing a small group of drivers is too small and homogeneous; epitomising a 90% head and 10%, heart, have-to without much want-to processes: and too often focusing on crises or problems and not opportunities..."
John Kotter et al, 2021

Strategic planning is very much a management-centric activity, and less a leadership-centric activity as it is designed primarily for reliability and efficiency.

Strategic planning can encourage the 'survival response', when the 'thrive response' is required (for more detail, see elsewhere in the Knowledge Base)

Pitfalls in Strategic Planning for Change

- top management dominate decision-making; with the rest of the organisation involved in execution only; hierarchical focus with a small team at the top making decisions means that it is increasingly difficult to have all the necessary information to make effective decisions.

- too much focus on data and analytics, ie data gathering (usually numbers), conducting analytical work and rational thinking plus planning for execution and then implementation; need to get the right data and interpret them correctly; based on the data, use of forecast and prediction which can be misleading; puts data before people and you shouldn't underestimate the value of experiences and feelings, ie hearts, emotions, etc inputs into decision-making
"...with the traditional process, the 'planning'  piece of strategic planning tends to prescribe in more and more detail how to achieve the goals. Consequently, this restriction freedom and room for innovation that employees have during implementation..."
John Kotter et al, 2021

Furthermore, digitalisation (AI, machine learning, big data methodologies, etc) is creating more data but not necessarily more information, knowledge and wisdom. Unfortunately, more data can be seen as threatening, ie it can be overwhelming owing to its sheer volume, etc and associated with heightening the survival response. The survival response was develop by our brain to handle physical threats. However, it does not distinguish between physical and other threats, like emotions, etc; it reacts to them all in the same way. Researchers has identified that if around 10% of the information manager receive is negative, this is enough to trigger a survival response and can work against a change initiative

- 'one-and-done' approach (the 'once-in-a-year' only development more refinement of a strategic plan reduces the chance of flexibility to react to new market feedback, be innovative, agile, etc)

- strategic planning is looking at one option (this can encourage a survival response, not the thrive response; conversely, incident scenario testing has a range of options, thus has more potential encourage the thrive response)

- tendency to cascade the plan down through the hierarchy (this means there is little buy-in and ownership of the plan by lower levels of the organisation, ie it is not their plan; this therefore restricts the thrive response and is more likely to activate the survival response because people can feel threatened by it)

- control by management (the plan gives more control to management over staff, eg information dissemination, formal processes, top down mandates, etc; this can actually constrain more than energise people)

- regarding strategic planning as an extension of the budget process

- not enough focus on leadership with a long-term lens (too much focus on management, operational processes; measurement is pivotal; more about the 'head' than the 'heart'; hierarchical control dominates but more leadership through 'informal' networks is what is needed; both hierarchical, and informal networks are needed
"...because they serve different purposes: reliability, efficiency and standardisation, and stability for management: innovation, mobilisation, adaptation and change for leadership..."
John Kotter et al, 2021

NB
"...while human nature is not dominated by high analytical thinking, a number of powerful forces have aided organisations to make up for this deficit in natural ability. Aids include the huge evolution of computer power, accumulation of massive data sets on industries and countries, an explosion in business school education, the ever-growing management consultancy industry staffed by analytically-sophisticated business school graduates..."
John Kotter et al, 2021

Nonprofit Strategic Plan

(source: https://infograph.venngage.com)