Hack:
Far too many plans fail: Reverse the curse with collaborative planning & execution

What can be done?

A people-centric process

The first thing you need to recognize is that planning and execution are people-centric endeavors. Whether people are involved in the planning process by collecting and analyzing data; generating insight and innovative efforts to move the business forward, or executing on those efforts through coordination and action, planning and execution are first and foremost defined by people.

As such, you need to always look at it through the lens of how people communicate, coordinate and collaborate.

In addition to the failure points identified by Forbes Insights and the performance factory, my personal research has pointed to four general approaches that should be in place to address the challenges of planning and execution. They are:

1. Document your goals and the plans for attaining them
2. Utilize execution best practices when you can
3. Support experimentation when you can’t
4. Always tap the wisdom of your crowd

Surrounding these fundamental attributes is the notion that all of this must be wrapped in a social process. I view “social” as communication, coordination and collaboration happening in an efficient, open and transparent way. It is through this social process that strategic plans can be understood, believed, and acted on with enthusiasm by everyone in the organization - with a far likelier outcome of success than otherwise would happen. I feel this is the heart of Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 ethos.

Document it

The act of writing a goal down is hugely beneficial. It takes what otherwise would be temporarily stored in short-term memory and puts it into long-term memory. That simple act is powerful. Dr. Gail Matthews, a Psychology professor at Dominican University of California, conducted a study that found that people who wrote down their goals, shared them with others, and maintained accountability for their goals were 33 percent more likely to achieve them, versus those who just formulated goals.

You can guess why this applies to planning? Just by writing something down you are more likely to get it done. Organizational planning is just scaling this process up to organizational activities and goals. It also has the huge benefit of making it easy for employees to reference the plan. E-mails get deleted, PowerPoint presentations get buried, and metrics-based dashboards are rarely actionable without a lot of leg work to get to the bottom of issues. Plans need to permeate employees daily work lives in a way that reinforces the goals and allows them to proactively participate in accomplishing them.

Use best practices

One of the books I read on my quest to understand failure and how to overcome it was The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get things Right by Atul Gawande. In the book he describes the work of philosophers Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre, who came up with some useful insights as to why we fail. One reason is what they call “necessary fallibility.” Our ability to achieve this is beyond our understanding and control. Not just the individual, but humans in general. Time travel would fall in this category.

There are other areas that are within our reach to understand them. In these areas, Gorovitz and MacIntyre break down failure into two categories – ignorance and ineptitude. With ignorance we’re relying on incomplete understanding, which leads to failure; cures for disease fit here. Ignorance can be forgiven, but, unfortunately, we have to take credit all ourselves for ineptitude because the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly.

Gawande goes on to explain that even with the increase in knowledge in science, which should have shifted the scale away from ineptitude-based failure, we still suffer from it. And the trouble is not just in the medical field, but in many professions. This may point to the capability of individuals and their training, but as Gawande says, “Training in most fields is longer and more intense than ever.” What he speculates has happened is this:

“The reason that our failures remain frequent is increasingly evident: The volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.”

 -Atul Gawande

In search of a cure, he identified two industries that can’t afford to fail and rarely do – the airline industry and the construction industry. It’s big news when an airplane crashes and it’s just as alarming when a building collapses, because they are so rare. These industries have spent enormous amounts of resources to avoid failure, because in their industries failure results in loss of life. What Dr. Gawande discovered was that they both use the simple checklist combined with plenty of communication to avoid failure. He is now working hard to introduce the checklist into high-risk healthcare procedures. And he’s showing dramatic results.

With technology having a profound effect on business, through the volume of information delivered, to the speed of change happening, all bringing about the globalization of the world’s economies, we, too, have exceeded our individual ability to deliver business benefits correctly, efficiently, or reliably. The promise is there but we suffer from ineptitude from sheer overload. This is where a checklist, in the form of a best practice, can be invaluable.

Support experimentation

Tim Harford, a columnist for The Financial Times, recently published Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. In this book he underscores that, in a complex world, the process of trial and error is essential. Dr. Gawande offers solutions for complex things we know how to do well, but need help implementing them. Mr. Harford provides thought around how to figure out complex things we don’t know how to do well.

Although adapting makes sense from a theoretical standpoint, the challenge comes when we’re enmeshed in execution. The problem lies in our inability to deal well with failure. We often treat it like a reflection on the skills and abilities of the person who was leading the failed effort, biasing them in our eyes. But what about all the failures which were just stepping stones to eventual success? In most cases, these successes would never have happened if those first failures had everyone throwing up their hands and going back to the ways things have always been done. We need to embrace an evolutionary approach to problem solving by making trial and error OK.

Thomas Edison may have said it best, “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward.” Just remember with good and bad ideas, you don’t have one without the other.

There is a key to making experimentation part of the process. Here is an example. Many companies might have a goal of launching a new product. If they dug deeper they would find their real purpose in launching a new product is something else, i.e. increase revenue. This would be easier to see if they separated their desired outcome from the ways to achieve this outcome. By separating the two you will also realize you are free to come up with many ideas to help you achieve your goal. If you have more than one initiative you have options, which allows some ideas to fail while you still have others to take their place, i.e. experimentation.

Let’s say a competitor also wants to launch a new product, but they have separated their goals from their initiatives.  This company would see that their real goal is to increase top-line revenue or reduce customer defections or some other “end state” that launching a new product could achieve. By separating the two you can now experiment with a number of ways to achieve the goal of increasing top-line revenue. You could expand distribution through another sales channel, start selling your current products in a foreign market or launch that new product. Here is a diagram to illustrate my point.

Objectives are the end state and initiatives are what need to be implemented to achieve them. Action items are the efforts of people working on implementing initiatives. So a plan of action is comprised of initiatives and their actions designed to achieve a particular goal or outcome (objective).

Listen to the crowd

There is a dynamic in Harford’s premise that greater participation improves results, both in the number of experiments you perform and the number of voices that contribute to the feedback or dissention. This leads us to a final area to explore which has benefits to the planning and execution process – crowds. In your case, the rank and file employees of your company are your crowd, but they can also include suppliers, customers and others who have a stake in your business.

In James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds he makes a strong case based on accumulated scientific research that crowds outperform experts and also expert committees on decisions involving cognition, coordination and cooperation. The one we’re interested in is cognition, or thinking and information processing decisions, like market judgments. It is here that planning could gain a big boost by asking a wider audience what they think. And where else are you exposed to a large group who you can still hold in confidence than with the employees of your organization?

In fact, given how knowledgeable employees are on areas relating to your business, there is probably no better group of individuals to tap into, as long as they meet the three conditions for the group to be “intelligent” – being diverse, independent, and decentralized. When these conditions are present these groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. As much as leaders have demonstrated expertise in guiding businesses to success, the reality is they would be better served by reaching out and listening to their crowds.