Charmain Bogue | The Real Reason Most Strategic Plans Get Ignored

Charmain Bogue at work


The plan was never the problem. The meeting after the plan was the problem.

I have read a lot of strategic plans. I have helped write some of them. And the thing that strikes me every time is how much intellectual effort goes into producing a document that most of the people it is meant for will never read again after the launch presentation.

This is not a document design problem. It is a behavioral problem, and it has a specific cause.

What actually happens after the presentation

The plan gets launched with some combination of ceremony: a leadership retreat, a slide deck, a message from the executive director. People nod. Some of them are genuinely energized. Then everyone goes back to their inboxes, and the daily work reasserts itself, and nobody has built a mechanism to connect the decisions being made every day to the priorities in the plan that took months to write.

Three months later, the plan is in a shared drive. Six months later, nobody can remember what the four strategic pillars were. A year later, a new planning process starts and the first thing that happens is someone says we should probably look at what we said last time, and most people in the room do not know where to find it.

The bridge that is almost always missing

The missing piece is almost never more content in the plan. It is a cadence of short, recurring conversations that connect the plan to operational decisions. What did we say we would do? Did we do it? If not, what got in the way, and do we need to change the plan or change the behavior?

Those conversations are not glamorous. They do not produce the feeling of momentum that a launch event produces. They are hard to keep consistent when the quarter gets busy. But they are the thing. The plan without the recurring conversation is a compass with no one checking it.

The accountability structure nobody wants to build

I push every organization I work with on this same question: who owns the plan after the launch? Not who drafted it, who owns it going forward, meaning who is responsible for making sure it is being used, for surfacing the places where the work has drifted from the stated direction, and for bringing that back to leadership attention before it becomes a real problem.

The answer is almost always nobody has thought about that. The plan was seen as the deliverable. The planning process, the daily and weekly discipline of checking and correcting, was left to happen on its own. It does not happen on its own. It requires someone whose job is partly to be the keeper of direction, and it requires leaders willing to hear, regularly and honestly, that the organization is not on track.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
Charmain Bogue on the Work That Happens After the Fundraiser Ends Galas raise money. What happens the next morning is what actually matters. There's a version of non-profit work that looks great from the outside. The fundraiser is well-attended. The social media posts get shared. The annual report has professional photography and compelling statistics. Everyone feels good. And then Monday comes, and someone has to figure out how to turn $300,000 in donations into actual programs that actually reach actual people. That's where it gets hard. That's where most of the public stops paying attention. And that's where the real work lives. I've been involved in non-profit and public service work for most of my career, including years of managing large-scale programs with significant budgets and complex logistics. Charmain Bogue knows firsthand that the distance between raising money and spending it well is enormous, and not enough people talk about what fills that gap. Her...
Read more
Image
Charmain Bogue on Advising Boards and Telling Them What They Already Know The value of an outside advisor isn't new information. It's permission to act on old information. Most of the time, when I walk into a boardroom as an advisor, the people sitting around the table already know what's wrong. They know their strategic plan is stale. They know their leadership pipeline has gaps. They know they have a culture problem that no amount of pizza parties is going to fix. They don't need me to tell them. They need me to say it out loud so they can finally do something about it. That's a strange arrangement if you haven't experienced it, the idea that smart, capable people would pay someone to confirm what they already suspect. But it makes sense when you understand how organizations work. Internal voices carry baggage. When the VP of operations says the strategic plan needs an overhaul, people hear a power grab. When an outside advisor says it, people hear an objectiv...
Read more

Charmain Bogue | Why I Narrowed My Practice to Executive Coaching

Image
  Doing fewer things turned out to be the most strategic decision I ever made for my own work. For years, my advisory work was a buffet. Strategic planning engagements. Board facilitation. Training design. Coaching. If an organization had a problem in my general territory, I would build something for it. The variety was interesting, and saying yes to everything felt like growth. It wasn’t. It was diffusion. And the decision to focus my practice on executive coaching came from finally taking my own advice, the advice I had given dozens of organizations: you cannot be excellent at a thing you only do occasionally. The pattern I kept seeing in my own calendar When I looked honestly at my engagements, one pattern was impossible to ignore. The strategic plans, the training sessions, the facilitated retreats, all of them produced their best results when they came with sustained coaching attached. And they produced their most disappointing results when they didn’t. A strategy document wit...
Read more