The Strategy Revolution: Opening Up Your Strategic Planning Process
A manifesto for leaders ready to break free from the tyranny of traditional planning.
Three intensive days at a strategy offsite and your leadership team emerges with what feels like your best strategy yet. The vision is crystal clear, the market analysis spot-on, and everyone around the room is genuinely excited about the future you've mapped out together.
Fast-forward six months. That same strategy document sits buried in digital folders while your organisation grapples with disappointing results, confused teams and the nagging sense that somewhere between vision and reality, something fundamental went wrong.
If this scenario feels uncomfortably familiar, you're experiencing what Harvard Business Review researchers Alison Reynolds and David Lewis call "the tyranny of the tangible". They are referring to the compulsive focus on structure, process and governance when it comes to executing strategy. What actually determines strategic success is something else entirely and it is all about human engagement.
The Shocking Statistics On Strategic Failure
Despite brilliant minds and well-crafted plans, roughly 70% of strategic initiatives crash and burn during execution. Yet organisations aren't cutting back on strategy investment. If anything, they're doubling down, pouring more resources, time and effort into strategic thinking and planning.
The problem isn't the quality of strategic thinking happening at strategy offsites and in boardrooms. It's the fundamental disconnect between how we develop strategy and how we implement it. As Reynolds and Lewis discovered in their research with 80 senior executives across 20 countries, leaders overwhelmingly prioritise "redefining organisational structures, realigning decision authorities (governance) and reinventing processes" when embarking on strategic change.
Yet when those same executives were pressed about what actually derails execution, 76% pointed to employee interaction with people simply not working together effectively to make change happen. Here's another insight from the research: the breakdown isn't happening vertically within teams, but horizontally across different parts of the organisation. This creates a fascinating paradox where smaller, contained initiatives within single departments often succeed beautifully, while those big, enterprise-wide strategic transformations, the ones that really matter, struggle to gain traction because they require collaboration across traditional silos.
Why Leaders Choose the Familiar Path
Why do intelligent leaders consistently choose structure over human engagement? Reynolds and Lewis found the answer in executive fears: "We feel like we would lose control. Resistance to our plans would surface."
The irony is stark. Organisations loudly proclaim ambitions to be more innovative and adaptable, while their leaders simultaneously fear what might happen without control. As the researchers note: "If you want to be more innovative and agile and anything could happen, isn't that a truly brilliant notion?"
This organised, control-driven approach made sense in periods of stability and predictable growth. But in today's environment, where the business landscape shifts beneath our feet daily, clinging to command-and-control models isn't just ineffective. It is actively harmful.
The Case for Participative Strategy
The separation between strategy formation and execution has dissolved. Your best people expect to be engaged in shaping organisational direction, not just implementing a vision and roadmap created by someone else. Digital transformation has raised expectations for transparency and meaningful participation. Complex challenges require cooperation across multiple stakeholders, both internal and external.
When you open up your strategy, something remarkable happens:
You tap into new thinking through the intersection of diverse ideas
You build genuine ownership across your organisation, dramatically improving execution
You create more resilient strategies that can adapt to changing conditions
You develop stronger relationships with key stakeholders who become jointly invested in outcomes
You transform your organisation's ability to navigate complexity through collaborative advantage
The best part? You can access these benefits without sacrificing leadership accountability or speed to decisions.
Beyond the Tyranny of the Tangible
Reynolds and Lewis advocate for what they call "participative execution" which is an approach that "engages all stakeholders in an interactive and dynamic process" where strategic realities are confronted and explored together, options for responding are created collectively, and priorities are agreed upon and revised as required.
This isn't about abandoning leadership responsibility or creating endless consultation cycles. It's about evolving your approach to meet the demands of today's environment, where the pace of change has dissolved traditional boundaries between strategy formulation and execution.
As the researchers emphasise: "You need to go slow to go fast. You need to create the space for genuine interaction characterised by curiosity, expression of ideas, inquiry, and experimentation."
Your Collaborative Advantage Awaits
The future belongs to organisations that can harness what I call "collaborative advantage", the breakthrough thinking that emerges when diverse perspectives intersect around shared strategic challenges.
Your organisation already possesses this advantage. The question isn't whether you need it. It's whether you'll unlock it.
If you don't have Coca Cola’s famous formula or Colonel Sanders' secret recipe to protect for competitive advantage, then the game today is about democratising strategic decisions at all levels and partnering to complement your core capabilities. Traditional strategy done behind closed doors fails to leverage your organisation's collaborative advantage. In today's fast-paced, interconnected world, that's a problem we can no longer ignore.
Think of strategy like a map, not a plan. It doesn't need to be perfectly detailed from the start. It needs to guide, inspire and bring people along for the journey.
Ready to make strategy everyone's business?
The revolution starts with your very next strategic conversation. Who else needs to be in the room? What new ideas are lying dormant because your strategic conversations only flow in one direction? Are you creating strategy receivers or strategy creators?
The transformation from traditional to open, adaptive strategy isn't just about better outcomes. It's about unlocking the collective intelligence that already exists within and beyond your organisation's walls.
The collaborative advantage awaits. Let’s start opening up.
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