Avoid These 5 Strategic Planning Risks

Create better strategic plans by avoiding these five common mistakes.

Strategic planning takes a lot of time and energy. It is a high-resource type of exercise. Unfortunately, many times that process can be a worthless pain, and the worst thing that can happen with a strategic plan is everybody puts in all this effort, and then it gets archived, put on a shelf, and never looked at again. Here are some warning signs that you can look for to determine if your strategic planning process is flawed.

First, initiative proliferation. Do you have to use multiple pages just to add up all the different initiatives you’re thinking about pursuing?

The second risk is thinking too small. All the initiatives that are on your list are really small, incremental improvements to your business. They don’t really advance you to your strategic goals.

A third is thinking too big. All the initiatives are huge, everything has to line up perfectly, and it’s a really large bet that you’re taking with the organization.

A fourth risk is what I call starving the kids. Many organizations have a large, profitable business unit, and then they have a lot of smaller ideas that are going to be more rapid growth. The risk is you invest all your resources in the big known business and you starve those smaller businesses. The problem is you’re starving your future in doing so.

Finally, I call this fifth risk the random initiative generator. You look at all your initiatives, and they all seem really great, but when you try to figure out where they’re taking you, there’s no clear direction. An example I’ve seen was when I worked in a strategic planning group. When I first arrived in the group, I said, “Let me see our strategic plan.” I was handed a list of 37 acquisition targets. I said, “This is great. These all look like interesting companies that we should think about pursuing, but where’s the plan?” Well, that was the plan. It wasn’t a plan. It was a random list of companies that competed in the market we were in, and we didn’t know which of those acquisitions was going to be attractive and which ones were distractions. Our first task was fixing that strategic planning process, setting direction, and putting some focus to the initiatives that we pursue.

Take a look at your strategic planning process. Ask yourself if you’re showing some of these symptoms and make sure you set direction so that you can pursue initiatives that will add value and help you reach your destination.

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