Strategic planning: 10 mistakes to avoid

To cultivate and realize great entrepreneurial dreams and navigate the waves of uncertainty that are typical of our times, we must learn to combine a forward-thinking vision with healthy pragmatism.
On the one hand, the ability to define and share a common vision, built together with a broad range of collaborators, becomes essential. This translates into shared business strategies where everyone is aware of their role and the contribution they can make to the organization’s success. On the other hand, this visionary ability must be combined with the capacity to act daily and with the development of business systems that support the execution of the vision and strategy.
Dreaming big and taking small actions every day has enabled humanity to achieve great things.

The ability to combine vision and execution is one of the pillars of a Lean Lifestyle Company , a business that aims to create maximum value and fully express its human, technological, and organizational potential to achieve both enhanced performance and greater well-being.
To develop the ability to be both visionary and pragmatic, it is important to be mindful of certain recurring mistakes.

1. Instinctive decisions and the selection of the wrong goals

This is the mistake we fall into when decisions are made with limited data and partial information. It happens when decisions largely reflect the desires, models, and mental schemas of a few people rather than reflecting objective interpretations of risks and opportunities for the company.
A clever and effective way to broaden our mental schemas is to integrate them with those of others. Therefore strategic planning should be seen as a genuine team-building opportunity, where the final result reflects integration, mutual calibration, and constructive discussion for the benefit of the entire company, not just individual departments.

2. Lack of clear foundational elements: Values, Vision and Mission

When a company’s strategy lacks a connection to a long-term ideal vision and relies solely on opportunistic and speculative tactics, the probability of making the right choices is very low.
In any company, people are driven by the deep meanings and motivations behind their actions, not by cold percentages of improvement or challenging goals that are ends in themselves.

3. Insufficient communication with the team and stakeholders

When a strategy is not structured and well-communicated to everyone, it ceases to be a strategy. Instead, it becomes a collection of high-level statements and objectives that remain confined to the control room, failing to fulfill one of its primary tasks: “bringing everyone on board.”
The company’s strategy should clearly explain the direction it wants to take and why. To unite the efforts and contributions of all individuals towards the same direction. Furthermore, to be effective, communication must be designed to be bi-directional, meaning it should accept and incorporate feedback and content adjustments along the way.

4. One-way and authoritarian process

Behind the success and growth of the largest companies there is almost never a solitary and authoritarian head in command, but solid business management systems and an extensive team of people who are inspired and guided by the figure of the leader who, however, does not replace them in the decisions and operational management of the company.
The difference is subtle, but fundamental: making collaborators feel like substantial owners and conductors of the company instead of simple employees and executors of other people’s ideas.

5. Shortage in monitoring and verifying progress

Often the strategy of a company stops at the strategy generation phase (genesis of the strategic directions to be undertaken), without dedicating the right space to the design and implementation of the next two phases, the strategy deployment (operational declination at all levels of the strategy) and the strategy execution (monitoring and operational governance of the strategic plan), far more important if we place ourselves from the point of view of those who work in the company every day.
When and how to monitor, how to react to deviations, how to involve people, how to value progress, how to tie all the elements of the strategic plan together, are examples of the execution phase of a strategic plan during which the company must decide whether to persevere on its course, whether to calibrate or change direction.

6. Mismanagement of time constraints and resource allocation

Companies often do resource-overloaded planning. Workloads are not managed at “finite capacity”, but at “infinite capacity”.
Not managing time constraints and allocation of available resources leads companies not to recognize capacity gaps. The problem must be solved by appropriately managing the quantity of projects that are launched at the same time, adapting the compositions of the project teams based on the real overlaps between one project and another, and making use of agile and fluid forms of organization, where small and autonomous teams, with certain resources, are focused on very few projects in “full immersion” mode.

7. Planned activities without sufficient attention to failure factors

Everything we plan often doesn’t happen exactly the way we imagined it.
Some factors will contribute positively to achieving the desired results, while other factors will contribute negatively. In the context of planning and executing a winning business strategy, one of the most important skills to be developed at the managerial level is preventive care of possible failure factors.

8. Self-referentiality

Often many companies do not grow as they could because they do not plan for growth but instead tend to repeat strategic moves made in the past, because, ultimately, they provide greater security.
In a context with extreme variability and fast variations in market needs, it is a common mistake to focus on competitive factors defined from the perspective of the company and not of possible buyers. This error also stems from limiting observation to those who have already bought from us in the past.
If we want to break down the restrictions of self-referentiality in our business strategy, we must see our customers, past and current, with different eyes, and ask ourselves what to do so that they buy from us again while also widening the scope of supply, and begin to study more who today consciously chooses not to buy from us, but decides to buy goods and services from other competitors.

9. Bad balance between incremental innovation and high-impact innovation

A good strategic plan should protect the company from the risks related to the obsolescence of the business model, technologies, products and services, as well as help prevent crisis situations due to new regulatory and legislative constraints, new market conditions and everything that undermines the profitable functioning of the company.
At the same time, a good strategy should help the company seize new market, technology, product and service opportunities to grow profits and margins. This is achieved by balancing incremental improvement initiatives and initiatives aimed at creating new market spaces or aimed at creating competitive factors from scratch capable of making a difference compared to competitors.

10. Luck syndrome

It is the typical fallacy of those situations in which the growth of a company is linked to an industry that is growing and not to a specific strategy. Or when growth is linked to a strategic move guessed in the past but not followed by subsequent winning strategic moves.
In such cases the illusion of continued rise is dangerous, because the levers of growth are out of company control and do not show the dangerous structural deficiencies, until the problem erupts! We could also decline luck syndrome in its opposite: bad luck syndrome, that is, finding ourselves in a sector in rapid decline or with profound structural changes and resigning ourselves to corporate extinction. Again, the mistake is not focusing enough on the levers that the company can act on instead of being intoxicated or depressed only by external and contingent factors.