Why do strategies fail?

Introduction

Organizations spend a massive amount of resources on developing their strategies. An entity must take steps to ensure that their strategies have the best chance to become successful. Sometimes right strategies may also get fails. There are many reasons why strategy implementation fails.

Why do they go wrong?

There are many reasons why strategic planning will go wrong, leading a failure. There are business-specific reasons, but we would like to mention a few common reasons why it fails.

1. Strategies could often go wrong because of failing to communicate the strategies to the lower-level employees as there may be a cultural distraction between the executives who design the strategy and people in the latter part of the organizational hierarchy who are going to implement the strategy. If the plan doesn’t get communicated to employees, they will not understand how they are going to contribute towards achieving the organization’s strategy.

2. To keep the company on track it is important to put the right people in the right place when things get done. Some people may resist change. If you do not address the resistance carefully and tactfully, desired goals may not be able to achieve. We must understand one thing clearly, that is, resistance is not a problem, but it is a symptom in the change of the management process.

3. Use of an outside facilitator to make the plan will be beneficial as you can obtain experienced and expert knowledge. Some organizations solely depend on a third-party consultant to prepare the strategic plan. Whereas employees do not get much opportunity to contribute to the strategic plan, thus, the employees may not possess the required knowledge to execute the strategies. Thereby, failure occurs due to ineffective operation and not knowing the expected outcomes from the strategic planning.

4. In many cases, we have noticed that a proper mechanism has not been established to execute the plan. The absence of an internal committee for reviewing and monitoring the performance and correcting the deviations from the plan will have a greater impact on the execution of the plan properly.

5. Understanding the value of and need for a strategic plan is a great place to start, but just wanting something is not enough. A strategic plan may be prepared due to the company/organization policy of developing it mandatory (ex. some government organizations, and member institutes) or simply because of common sense says every good organization must have a plan.

Why is it not realistic?

Goals must be realistic to be achieved because if people feel the goals are unachievable, they may not try to execute the plan. So, you need to pay more considerable attention when designing your strategic plan. Understanding the effects of the external environment factors also plays a significant role as more powerful stakeholders as customers and government stay outside the business.

You should assess the performance frequently. By shortening the performance the monitoring cycle, you will be enabled to have more real-time feedback.” The reason why Walmart is so good at execution because they know daily if what it is doing in each of its stores gets results or not.

Although there are many barriers to successful strategy implementation, the barriers can be overcome by using clearly structured plans with well-defined objectives.