Why Most Strategic Plans Fail — And What Organisations Can Do About It

Most organisations are adept at producing strategic plans. They hold workshops, hire consultants, print glossy documents, and stage elaborate launch events. Yet according to research by Professor Rebecca Homkes of the London Business School and her colleagues, only 25 per cent of organisations manage to execute their strategic plans to achieve the intended results. The rest invest time, money, and institutional energy into blueprints that gather dust.

The gap between planning and execution is one of the most persistent problems in management, and William Kofi Dowokpor, a management consultant at GiBS-Accra, argues in a recent analysis that the failure is rooted in five widely held myths about how strategy works in practice.

The first myth is perhaps the most damaging: treating the development and launch of a strategic plan as an end in itself. Organisations celebrate the document rather than the outcomes it is supposed to deliver. The plan becomes a trophy rather than a tool, and without deliberate mechanisms to drive execution, neglect sets in almost immediately after the launch event.

The second myth concerns alignment. Many organisations assume that cascading objectives up and down the hierarchy through key performance indicators is sufficient. But vertical alignment without horizontal coordination — across departments, functions, and external stakeholders — leaves critical gaps. A marketing team may hit its targets while the operations team works at cross-purposes, and the overall strategy stalls.

The third myth is the belief that a single approach to strategy management can work across all contexts. In an era of rapid change, execution demands nuance, agility, and continuous adjustment. The one-size-fits-all mentality assumes a stability that no longer exists in most industries.

The fourth myth involves the separation of planning from execution. Dowokpor argues that the two are inextricably linked — every part of the planning process must keep execution in view. Strategies designed without considering the practical realities of implementation are destined to fail, no matter how elegant the vision.

The fifth myth is the reliance on vertical, cascading approaches to execution while ignoring the need for simultaneous decisions and actions at multiple levels. Modern organisations operate horizontally as much as vertically, and strategies that fail to account for cross-functional coordination will collapse under their own complexity.

What replaces these myths? Dowokpor advocates for a holistic execution framework built on three pillars: shared context, coordinated commitments, and an execution culture.

Shared context goes beyond simply communicating the strategy. It means ensuring that every member of the organisation — from the executive suite to the operational floor — thoroughly understands where the organisation is heading, why, and the specific role each person plays in getting there. This understanding must leave room for discretion and initiative, not just compliance.

Coordinated commitments require robust processes that secure performance agreements not only up and down the hierarchy but across departments and with external stakeholders. Resources — cash, logistics, personnel, managerial attention — must be allocated and coordinated with the same rigour applied to the strategy itself.

The third pillar, execution culture, is where Dowokpor takes a deliberately controversial position. He argues that prioritising an execution culture — built on shared knowledge, attitudes, practices, and values — yields better results than a pure performance culture. Performance monitoring, he contends, can breed selfishness, turf wars, and departmental isolation. An execution culture, by contrast, creates the conditions for innovation, collaboration, and collective accountability.

The final ingredient is accurate data. In a fast-changing operating environment, strategies built on outdated or unreliable information are doomed from the start. Clean, timely data is the foundation on which all other elements of execution rest.

For organisations in Ghana and across Africa, where strategic planning has become increasingly common in both the public and private sectors, the lesson is clear: the plan is not the strategy. Execution is. And until leadership teams invest as much in the machinery of execution as they do in the ceremony of planning, the 25 per cent success rate is unlikely to improve.

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