An ineffective strategizing and planning process can cost your business time and money. Without a proper strategy devised in reasonable time and considering key factors, a business can lose its competitive edge.
A business can also lose the opportunity to capitalize on key market changes, industrial trends, or growth potential. Moreover, when a business plans a significant organizational change, it again needs to hinge on a strategic plan.
A strategic plan, developed correctly within a reasonable timeframe, can serve as the best in directing a company’s progress toward goal realization. However, many professionals and business executives make several common mistakes during strategic planning. In turn, it prevents the business from capitalizing on the opportunities that present themselves.
According to Mark L. Vincent, a leading business strategic advisor and pioneer in the field of process consulting, a strategic plan is more than simply a spreadsheet with facts and figures. An enterprise is better to plan for multiple scenarios in order to progress, grow, and expand.
It is a favorable tool for guiding a business towards expanding internally and externally with the help of decisive considerations. Regardless, many executives and professionals, like consultants, often mistake a strategic plan as merely a "course of decisions or actions" for a limited set of scenarios or periods.
Here are some of those common strategic planning mistakes that might hinder your business's progress:
· Lack of Direction and Concreteness
Your strategic plan has to be more than “sounds convincing”, shares Vincent. Starting multiple companies throughout his professional career while helping hundreds of clients with his process consulting expertise, he claims that a strategic plan must be concrete and state precise goals and objectives.
He also shared that one of the common reasons strategic plans don't work and are extremely ineffective is because they give a vague idea of where the organization is expecting to get. If there is no point of destination and only details about the point of existence, it often leaves readers wondering about the actual purpose of strategizing at the current stage.
· Lack of Distinctness
Another common mistake that occurs during strategic planning is that executives fail to show the distinctness of their proposed strategy. Often due to confirmation biases, new plans aren't fully approved or modified to reflect the old strategies as executives and other professionals are expecting something similar to the previous strategy.
Most professionals often reinterpret fresh strategy plans in the light of older strategies and therefore, deem it necessary to find similar elements before confirmation. Considering this, a lot of executives fail to acknowledge the distinctness of their new strategy and how it deviates from the current one to achieve objectives.
· Lack of Coherence
Vincent highlighted that many strategy plans lack coherence and that is a letdown for readers. Business leaders expect comprehensible plans that weave many complex ideas into one coherent whole. He claims that this not only makes the strategy plan solid and easily digestible, but also enables quicker cost-benefit analysis, evaluation, and testing.
A strategy plan that weaves the major changes or upgrades in a distinct, coherent, actionable, and convincing manner is the ultimate solution to adapting your organization for growth.
