Average length of time for a planning process
A nonprofit typically requires six to twelve months (or longer) to complete its strategic planning process. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation conducted a study in 2006 which revealed that the average length of time for a strategic planning process supported by an organizational effectiveness grant from the foundation was fourteen months.
Stephanie McAuliffe, director, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, in remarks at the Council of Foundations’ annual conference, 7 May 2006, in a session she and David La Piana co-led titled Strategic Planning: Less Than Meets the Eye?
Failures of strategic planning
From Business Performance Measurement by Andy Neely:
This failure of strategic planning to create focus and achieve results is reflected in the findings from executives we have surveyed. . . . Typically between 60 and 80 percent of respondents to these surveys express strong dissatisfaction with the strategic planning processes in their organizations. The principal reasons cited for these concerns include plans that lack focus, failure to implement strategy effectively, and failure to follow up and to demand accountability. (156–57)
The failure of many strategic planning processes, and by extension the lack of organizational performance, is a result of the inability of the process, as implemented, to create focus among those executives charged with developing strategy, on the few challenges and opportunities that are critical to the future viability and success of the organization. (158–59)
In too many strategic planning activities, there is not enough mental toughness, political will, or shared understanding achieved to reduce the strategic agenda to a realistic and manageable critical few . . . it is difficult for strategists to identify the same array of options for the firm, and even more difficult for them to agree on implementation approaches. Unless the right process is employed, strategic planning becomes a list-making activity—long lists of opportunities, capabilities, and things to do, with no real sense of priority. (172)
(Andy Neely, ed., Business Performance Measurement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
From Keith McFarland’s “A Better Scheme for Strategic Planning”:
“Today, traditional strategic planning may sometimes cost companies more than it contributes. More importantly, they often get in the way of real work—especially in small to midsize businesses, where quick adaptation is the key to survival.”
Keith McFarland, “A Better Scheme for Strategic Planning,” BusinessWeek.com
(January 19, 2005), www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jan2005/sb20050119_9832_sb037.htm.
Some years ago a business study revealed that only 10 percent of strategies adopted by corporations were deemed successful. Commenting on this report, management guru Tom Peters (author of In Search of Excellence) said that figure was “wildly exaggerated!”
Rod Napier, Clint Sidle, and Patrick Sanaghan, High Impact Tools and Activities for Strategic Planning: Creative Techniques for Facilitating Your Organization’s Planning Process [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996], 1.
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