Planning, some say, is a way to make God laugh. More often than not, plans fail. Strategic plans, begun with great excitement and created with satisfaction, often gather dust in the director's office within a few months. Michael Hammer, guru of the organizational reengineering move-ment of the early 1990s, estimates that more than 70 percent of reengineering plans failed. Top executives report that most total quality management (TQM) efforts of the 1980s failed to produce organizational value. Recent studies revealed that projected benefits from business mergers failed to materialize in 85 percent of the cases. These statistics come from businesses that hired the world's experts in change management, invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, per month, in change processes.

I believe that every human being in the United States understands the value of planning. More management and personal development books have been written about goal setting and strategic planning that any other topic.

Planning is often evaluated on the elegance of the decision. What really counts, of course, is the follow through—the implementation. The quality of implementation relates to how the plan was created. Not considering planing methods early in the planning process sows the seeds of failure of the decisions in the implementation.

Well-implemented plans achieve the desired results, efficiently, on time, and with few unintended side effects. The secret of good implementation is simple. Implementation requires commitment from all needed to carry it out.

We can all think of poor planning that achieved stupendous results. Why? People were committed to the desired results. If the plan is inadequate, committed people learn from that, make corrections, and achieve. When people are not committed, they watch your beautiful plan slowly veer off course, and when it crashes, they may secretly smile.

Including the doers early in the planning is more critical than having the deciders create a well-designed plan. The doers ideas must be articulated, accommodated, and integrated during the design of the plan. Postponing inclusion until the plan is finalized means selling it to the stakeholders, not accommodating those who will ultimately make it work.

If the deciders listen to the doers after the plan if completed, the plan will require accommodation to new ideas. Finding the willingness to change the plan after the binders have been embossed is like expecting an architect to accommodate the carpenter's suggestion. The doers, excluded from real participation in the plan's design, expect their ideas will be discounted and they acquiesce. Deciders misinterpret this acquiescence as agreement and support. When the plan does not work well, the doers get blamed for lack of follow through.

The Reasons Plans Fail

As you read below the twelve reasons for failed plans, evaluate your museum's planning effort in the space provided.

1. Lack of Vision

Research supports what leaders have known for centuries: a strong vision contributes to success. Vision embraces values that never change in the service of a long-range purpose. Vision serves to inspire commitment and focus action. As the museum achieves shorter-term goals, new ones are formulated in response to unchanging values and stable purpose.

Values and purpose, not projects or campaigns, drive the museum to success over the long run. For instance, a capital campaign can inspire and focus the organization, but only for a few years. When the new building opens, the museum will begin to drift unless sufficient agreement on the mission and values carry beyond opening night.

2. Lack of Information

Plans often fail because we base them on incomplete information. The information usually missing from the plan is external to the museum and includes:

• market size

• strength of the market's need for the museum's products and services

• clarity on the market's willingness to pay the museum's price in dollars, time and accessibility

• impact of competitors, especially indirect ones, who fill the same market need with a different time or service

• analysis of perceived value of the museum to donors, supporters, and funders.

This type of information is available for the asking through market research and feasibility studies, which can elicit this data through well-crafted, efficient questions.

3. Lack of Inclusion

Information may be missing from inside the organization, too. The leaders may exclude professional, technical, administrative, and support staff from the planing process. Volunteers, political activists, and even board members may be excluded. Plans in museums are frequently drawn without including ideas from the front line staff—guards, ticket takers, volunteer docents, sales shop clerks, and parking attendants.

These failures of inclusion occur because leaders believe:

• They have little to contribute.
• We cannot involve too many people.
• We don't want to involve them until we have a better idea of where we are going.
• There would be too much disagreement.
• It's too hard for them to deal with these issues.

These beliefs limit inclusion. Fortunately, effective processes, structures, and facilitators exist for including people successfully—even many people. For the leaders, inclusion means listening and understanding, not abdicating authority to set the final course. Sequential inclusion does not build sufficient commitment to planning. The power of planning comes from simultaneous inclusion.

4. Lack of Strategy

Most strategic plans lack strategy. What's needed is strategic thinking, not strategic planning. Strategic plans consist of long lists of goals, objectives, tasks, and actions. Powerful strategy fits on a page or two. Plans fill pages and binders. The purpose of strategy is to define the organization in a unique niche. When this is not done, the organization competes for resources and customers with other, similar organizations. Most organizations have plans; very, very few have strategies.

5. Participation as an End

Involving lots of people because you believe in participation may create a hodgepodge plan. You pass the basket and everyone contributes. Inconsistent, contradictory, and ill-conceived ideas accumulate and get packaged into the plan. These plans have high agreement but little focus and require unrealistic resources. The management fads for participative "visioning" and development of mission statements have largely resulted in useless, unused documents.

The solution? Include people in a way that respects and builds on their needs and has focus and direction. This process requires synthesis of needs and perspectives to create new ideas. The process often transforms the people involved, too, and creates agreement on a future for the museum.

6. Lack of Productive Conflict

People included in the planning process will have different perspectives and concerns. These differences have value. If the differences remain hidden and unexplored, they can be destructive. For example, if the need for job security is not addressed, individuals may be unable to concentrate on changing the museum's structure.

The planning climate must constantly encourage honest, complete input. When participants strive to learn from conflict, synthesis can occur and can generate new and more powerful ideas for resolving differences.

7. Untested Assumptions

Invariably, planners use information, make decisions, and draft plans without challenging deeply held, underlying assumptions that supports favorite positions. Our universal desire to feel good and be nice works against honest exploration of differing ideas. A skilled facilitator can help the planners explore assumptions typical to museum such as:

• The public needs what we have.
• We'll build it and they will come.
• People want to see the real thing.
• Everyone in town says that having a good museum is valuable. And ours is good.
• Our mission is valid.
• The Titanic is unsinkable.

Identifying, testing, and challenging assumptions critical to your plan will allow it to stand on solid ground. For implementation success, assumptions must be regularly monitored as well. Plans often fail because assumptions change while the plan remains. For example, a state museum association was originally created to lobby the statehouse. A decade later, the association does no lobbying and focuses primarily on serving individual museum professionals yet membership is limited to institutions. Individuals can't join!

8. Lack of Communication and Accommodation

People need to know about your plans. A volunteer may feel marginalized when she hears that a gallery is closing from a friend rather than from a museum authority. She may wonder: Why the secrecy? I feel stupid not knowing!

Every stakeholder can't be included in the planning process, but communications can go to everyone. Face-to-face communication is by far the most effective medium known to humankind, but videos, memos, newsletters, and telephones, and E-mail all help. Your responsibility is to send the communication and to engage in sufficient dialogue to ensure understanding that will build energy and commitment.

Often, by the time planners communicate their effort, they psychologically etch it in stone. Their task is finished. Done. Complete. Not open to change. When they begin to vet the plan, on some level, they're thinking: We created it. We're proud of it. Thank God, labor's over. Don't criticize our newborn plan! This natural and unconscious attitude usually blocks dialogue and undermines energy and commitment.

Communicating the plan usually surfaces questions, disagreements, and doubts. Planners ignore or discard these at the plan's peril. Each discard reduces energy and commitment. Some best-known failures of top-down, central planning can be seen in the breakup of the former Soviet Union, of IBM, and the World Bank's attempts to help developing countries. Exploring and accommodating feedback may mean modifications, typically in how rather than what gets done. If accommodation is not made, planners lose the opportunity to build commitment and may secure only compliance from those responsible for implementing the plan. If you end "being right," the plan stands, unchanged, but energy for implementation may be low.

9. Lack of Strategic Alignment

Plans by themselves lack sufficient power to guide an organization, particularly if change is required. Like a supertanker, organizations have extraordinary momentum to keep on the old course. Even if the captain spins the wheel to a new direction, the autopilots deep in the bowels of the ship will correct to the old course unless they, too, are reset.

Museums have at least seven autopilots: strategy, culture, structure, systems, resource allocation, staffing, and rewards and recognition. If the plan requires change, the autopilots require alignment with the new direction. This means creating a strategic culture, a strategic structure, and so forth, aligned with new strategies.

10. Lack of Strategic Focus

Most planning efforts create pages of new things to do. When these are layered on already full work loads and over committed resources, it means everything gets spread thinner. Everything gets done a little less.

Setting strategy means making the tough decisions on what not to do. Invariable these decisions are tough for two reasons. First, each and every activity has advocates. Second, each and every activity has a good argument for pursuit. When planners shy from tough decisions, strategy is undermined. A plan is not strategic unless it spells out what the organization will stop doing. A slow, ongoing accumulation of priorities accelerates aging and bureaucratization.

11. Plans not Finalized

Finalizing a plan consists of breaking the plan down into reasonable sized tasks which define the results to be achieved, by what date, and by designating a champion responsible and accountable for the results.

Many tasks require a team effort. Assigning accountability to a team only works when the team is functioning at a level high enough that each team member accepts 100 percent of the responsibility for the result. Too often, team assignments mean that no one takes the responsibility. If effective team work is not the cultural norm within the organization, one person should have the responsibility for the results.

Unfinalized plans drift because employees work away as they always have. Effectively assigning strategic tasks often means changing some job descriptions and reallocating resources.

Each element of the plan requires the details of: what results, by whom, by when, and with what resources. Without these, the plan is only a wish.

12. Specifying Results, not Activities

Many plans specify activities such as: improve coordination between x and y or launch a training program for field workers. These imply that coordination and training are the purpose of the organization. More likely, the need is to improve coordination to reduce duplication of work or to train to improve customer service.

Not spelling out the results can mean that you get better coordination, without a reduction in duplicated services. If the goal is better customer service, be sure to spell that out and hold people accountable for this result, not for setting up a training program. Not specifying the result is the precursor of irresponsible behavior.

Improving Your Planning Process

If the twelve reasons Why Plans Fail make sense to you, you have the raw data to redesign and improve your planning and decision-making process. A sum of thirty-five or higher for either Questions A or Questions B indicates that you can significantly improve your planning process.

If this article has failed to describe Why Plans Fail you may improve your planning process by rigorously analyzing why your past plans and decisions have not been well implemented. Create your own list of reasons Why Plans Fail to improve your planning process.

Strongly Agree = 5; Agree = 4, Unsure = 3; Disagree = 2; Strongly Disagree =1

1A. This reason for why plans fail makes sense to me
1B. This reason contributed to the success or failure of my museum's plan

2A. This reason for why plans fail makes sense to me
2B. This reason contributed to the failure of my museum's plan

3A. This reason for why plans fail makes sense to me
3B. This reason contributed to the failure of my museum's plan

4A. This reason for why plans fail makes sense to me
4B. This reason contributed to the failure of my museum's plan

5A. This reason for why plans fail makes sense to me
5B. This reason contributed to the failure of my museum's plan

6A. This reason for why plans fail makes sense to me
6B. This reason contributed to the failure of my museum's plan

7A. This reason for why plans fail makes sense to me
7B. This reason contributed to the failure of my museum's plan

8A. This reason for why plans fail makes sense to me
8B. This reason contributed to the failure of my museum's plan

9A. This reason for why plans fail makes sense to me
9B. This reason contributed to the failure of my museum's plan

10A. This reason for why plans fail makes sense to me
10B. This reason contributed to the failure of my museum's plan

11A. This reason for why plans fail makes sense to me
11B. This reason contributed to the failure of my museum's plan

12A. This reason for why plans fail makes sense to me
12B. This reason contributed to the failure of my museum's plan