The board approved the plan. There was a launch, a few all-staff emails, maybe a poster in the lunchroom. Eighteen months later, nobody refers to it unless someone asks how the organization is tracking, and then there’s a scramble to find the document.
It’s a common story. I’ve seen it many times, from inside organizations and from the consultant’s chair. When people ask me why strategic plans fail, my answer is that very few fail on paper. They fail in the months after approval, when nothing connects the plan to the decisions the organization makes every week.
What does it mean when a strategic plan fails?
Most strategic plans don’t fail dramatically. They stop being used. The plan goes on the shelf, and three years later someone opens it to ask whether any of it was achieved.
The plans I’ve seen fail have a lot in common. They were usually written by a small group of senior leaders as a one-off exercise, then handed to the rest of the organization to deliver. They often tried to cover everything, so they were long, specific and hard to follow. Once approved, they were treated as finished.
Usually, that isn’t a lack of commitment. The people who write these plans care about them. The problems are structural, which is good news, because structure can be fixed.
What a working strategic plan looks like
The simplest way I know to explain a strategic plan is a family vacation.
Picture the parents sitting the kids down and saying: next summer, we’re going to Europe for two weeks. Here’s the budget per person. We want somewhere warm with a beach, a bit of sightseeing and good food. That’s the vision, and it’s where the strategic plan starts.
Then they hand it over. The family decides together which countries to visit, since that’s a decision everyone has a stake in. After that, the kid who is good at this sort of thing takes on the flights. Another books the hotels. Someone else finds the restaurants. Each of those is an operational plan, owned by the person doing the work, and they only hold together if the people booking them keep talking to each other. Hotels in Spain don’t help much if the flights land in France a week later.
The trip starts, and France is a disappointment. Nobody likes it. So they change a flight and get to Spain two days early. That isn’t the plan failing. The vision hasn’t moved: warm, a beach, some sightseeing, good food, on budget. Only the route has. If it isn’t working, change it.
That only works because the family keeps talking while they travel. Someone watches what’s being spent, and over dinner they check what’s booked for the next few days and whether it still makes sense.
Now picture the other version. The parents decide on the destination, book every flight, hotel and restaurant themselves, and announce the itinerary at dinner. I’d bet that trip goes less smoothly. Nobody else had a say, nobody owns any part of it, and the first time something goes wrong, everyone looks at the two people who planned it.
Most failed strategic plans are the second trip.
What’s the difference between a strategic plan and an operational plan?
A strategic plan sets where the organization is going, why that direction matters and which few priorities will get it there. Operational plans turn those priorities into specific activities, with owners, timelines and resources.
The difference is between choices and activities. A strategic plan has to make real choices: what the organization will focus on, what it won’t, and how it will know it’s making progress. Without those choices it’s just a vision statement, too vague to guide anything. Operational plans are where the activities live.
A lot of plans fail because the strategic plan tries to do both jobs. It fills up with deliverables, targets and project lists until it reads like a work plan. At that point it’s too detailed for most people to understand and too rigid to deliver, since every specific item becomes a promise that a change in funding or circumstances can break.
A strategic plan should be short enough that a frontline staff member, a board member and a funder can each read it and describe where the organization is going in roughly the same words.
| Strategic plan | Operational plans | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | Where are we going, why, and which priorities will get us there? | What will we do, who owns it, and by when? |
| Measures | Progress on priorities and outcomes | Delivery of activities against timelines |
| Horizon | Three years or more | Usually one year |
| Owned by | The board and executive | Management and the teams doing the work |
| Length | A few pages | As long as the work needs |
| Changes when | The direction or priorities change | Circumstances change |
The plan was written by people who won’t deliver it
When a plan is written in isolation by senior leadership, the people who have to deliver it have no reason to see themselves in it. They treat it as someone else’s document, because it is.
I started my career in EMS in one of the most junior roles there is, as a non-emergency call taker, and worked my way up to Chief Operating Officer of a provincial system. Over that time I sat on almost every side of a strategic plan. The ones that worked were the ones where people at every level could find their own work in them.
I remember developing a recruitment plan that focused on getting more paramedics through training and onto the road. Experienced paramedics pointed out that the plan relied on them to mentor new colleagues on top of their normal workload, which they felt would lead to burnout. Their feedback led us to build dedicated mentoring time, and support for the paramedics doing the mentoring, into the plan.
Bringing people in doesn’t mean every decision goes to a vote. It means asking the board, the leadership team, staff and the people who depend on your services what they see, early enough that their answers can still change the plan. In a complex organization that takes real time, and it involves some difficult decisions about what makes the cut. How to run that well is a subject of its own, and I’ll come back to it in a separate post.
Nobody checks it until year three
Many organizations treat a three-year strategic plan as fixed for three years, and that’s where a good plan quietly goes stale.
Your circumstances won’t wait for the review cycle. Funding changes. A new government sets new priorities. Technology changes how the work gets done. In my experience, the assumptions a plan rests on can shift several times over the life of a three-year plan. A plan nobody revisits until year three is a plan for a situation that no longer exists.
Why a rolling strategic plan holds up better
A rolling strategic plan keeps a three-year horizon but is refreshed on a set cycle, usually once a year. Each refresh goes back to the assumptions the plan was built on, asks which priorities still hold and which need to move, and then rolls the horizon forward a year. The vision stays steady while the route adjusts, the same way the family moved its flight to Spain without cancelling the trip.
The annual refresh doesn’t replace the regular check-ins described below. It does a different job: the check-ins track progress, and the refresh questions whether the plan is still the right one.
The plan isn’t connected to the decisions being made
A strategic plan stays alive when it becomes the test every significant decision is checked against, and it fades once decisions start getting made around it.
In practice this is simple. Before a new project, program or major spend is approved, someone at the table asks:
- Where does this sit on the plan?
- Does it move one of our stated priorities forward?
- Does it fit the plan’s timelines, or does it compete with something already underway?
If the answer to the first question is “it doesn’t,” that isn’t automatically a no. Sometimes the plan needs to change. What matters is that the conversation happens out loud, where the decision is being made, instead of the plan being quietly overtaken. Over time, the plan becomes the frame the organization runs on rather than a document it produced once.
How do you keep a strategic plan in use?
Make the plan a standing item on the board agenda and run a short, regular checkpoint against its priorities.
It doesn’t need to be elaborate. Pick a point in the year, say it’s May, and ask:
- Where did we expect to be on each priority by now?
- What’s working?
- What isn’t?
- What do we need to adjust?
- Do we need more support anywhere?
The board’s job is to ask those questions about strategic priorities, outcomes and significant risks, not to manage individual deliverables. Management can run the same questions across teams’ operational plans, then bring the board a clear picture of progress, the risks that matter and the decisions that need its attention. That way the board hears about problems while they’re still small, instead of reading a summary of good news.
When the answers are honest, problems surface while there’s still time and money to fix them. A non-refundable hotel booked for the wrong week is cheap to catch at the planning stage and expensive to discover at the front desk.
It helps to be clear about the rhythm:
- At every board meeting: progress on priorities, significant risks and emerging issues.
- Once a year: the full refresh, testing assumptions and priorities and rolling the horizon forward.
- Whenever circumstances change materially: a major funding shift, a new mandate, a change in leadership. Reopen the plan then rather than waiting for the scheduled review.
Before your next board meeting
There’s an old line that a strategy without the money is just a dream. I’d add that a strategy nobody checks is just a document.
A strategic plan earns its keep when two things are true: the people delivering it can see their own work in it, and leadership uses it to make real decisions. Everything else in this post is a way of getting to those two conditions. None of it requires a complicated process, though involving people properly takes time and commitment.
If you do one thing, put the five checkpoint questions on your next board agenda and see what the answers tell you.
If you’re starting a new plan, or trying to revive one that has stalled, WMC works with boards and executive teams on both the writing and the implementation. You can read more about our strategy development and implementation work.
