What are the most common obstacles to effective strategic planning?

In my experience, teambuilding is very important in aligning departments in a common vision. Involving every team lead in communicating their vision, obstacles, and proposed solutions before planning can help create a clear, cohesive vision. Encouraging open, honest communication between teams and clearly documenting the POS of the overall organization and each team allows for an easier flow of creativity and communication.

When election results, whether local, regional or national are a big shock or a big shift from te previous one, it is often a sign of public administration not listening or not knowing what is really on the minds of the people. Therefore it can be very useful using these kind of methods or even referenda to learn how the people think and what the concerns are that they want the public officials to work on.

Everyone has imagination and vision. Every entity has potential. Organizations, cities, groups, and families all know what they need to be successful and happy as individuals and a collective. Cultivating stakeholder input and reassembling it as the vision stakeholders actually want and need along with steps to get there is the entire point of strategic planning.

Vision is the dent your organization wants to make in the universe. The positive impact you want to have. Even better if you can measure it and say by when. For example - By 2040 all children will graduate from high school in our county ready to go into college, the military or have a living wage job. Then all your resources align behind it. You finally have a compass! Some visions take life times to achieve.

Change is inevitable, as is resistance to it. Strategic planning is about nothing but change, otherwise why do it? It helps to acknowledge that upfront. This will be uncomfortable at times, sometimes a lot! We’ve had success in building change structures into the implementation of plans. For example, goal teams that are deliberately cross functional and multidisciplinary. Get people really working together who never have before. Dissolve the silos - the fiefdoms. Those walls create the most challenging resistance to change because it is institutional and cultural. Make reaching the goal more important than holding up the fiefdom!

Resistance to change is a common obstacle in strategic planning. Employees often fear the unknown, loss of comfort zones, and a perceived lack of control. Past negative experiences with change and inadequate understanding can also breed resistance. Leadership's attitude and communication play a crucial role. Incentives, recognition, and addressing change fatigue are vital strategies. Overcoming resistance requires clear communication, involvement of employees, and aligning change efforts with organizational culture and values. Business professionals must proactively address these factors to ensure successful strategic planning and implementation.

It is key to assess your staff and clients for their tolerance for change. This allows projects respectfully to be planned and ensures clear communications to remedy any discomfort. People go through change everyday and don’t even realize it. That doesn’t mean we should normalize feelings of discomfort. But it does mean, we have an obligation to explain the change nicely and that’s it.

Provided there is true buy-in from leadership, a simple change and communication strategy is essential. Use the following to create a simple template in excel: Identify ALL impacted audiences, what's changing for that audience, the audience's anticipated reaction to the change, messaging for how to respond, including talking points outlining benefits associated with the change and the pain points the change will address, and the appropriate communication channels to deliver the message.

Roger Martin's Playing to Win Strategy is unique in that it utilizes hypothesis testing to identify the strategy with the highest potential, enabling companies to be good stewards of finite resources.

Resource/ opportunity/ strength identification is a critical path step in planning: What do we have? What can we do? What is the best action?. Making a plan that doesn’t fit available resources is actually making sure the plan will not leave the shelf.

A key part of strategic planning should include available resources and lack of resources in the initial SWAT evaluation. Goals created without the consideration of the resources to accomplish those goals can remain year to year and waste valuable time and money in the long run.

Writing strategic planning goals in the SMART format is crucial. Ensure that A = ‘Attainable' addresses resource adequacy directly. Discuss your proposed strategic planning goals at different organizational levels. If you're informed about resource constraints, listen attentively. Without ample resources and organizational buy-in, successful implementation of the strategy becomes challenging, if not impossible.

A realistic Implementation Plan is the often forgotten culmination of a real Strategic Planning Process. Making inventories of tangible and intangible resources not only enlarges the pool of funding, but also good feeling of cultural, heritage and other unique characteristics of a business or place. This is done first so that the steps to execute the plan are the final deliverable to the client or your boss.

In my experience some common obstacles in strategic planning are four fold. Lack of focus. The ability to say no, lack of communication/feedback loops, creation of a realistic implementation plan. The goal of the strategic plan is to give direction on the objectives that you that make the most impact and give the highest ROI. oftentimes, it is only used as a checked box not something that useful for progress.

I have seen some planners with the inability to visualize and conceptualize the plan as the plan unfolds as it’s implemented. Rather they would rather take a cookie cutter approach and just be done with it. They need to have skin in the game.

Giving less focus on the dynamic nature of a strategic planning and the Conation dimension of any team member. Things get very quick static, formatted in preexisting framework without allowing actors to discover how naturally they get things done or approach problem solving to improve collaboration and communication during the planning, execution and evaluation of the strategic planning.