One of the greatest tools for PR practitioners is a timely and dynamic strategic plan that is proactively and enthusiastically integrated throughout the organizations they serve. Unfortunately, surveys show this is a rarity for most organizations.

For many companies, strategic planning means going offsite for a few days once a year and laying out the company's goals and direction for the next 18-36 months.

Surveys reveal that most executives are dissatisfied with the business results they get from formal strategic planning. Many employees, including those in management, believe that significant strategy decisions are made outside of the formal discipline of strategic planning. This often results in a cynicism about strategic planning throughout the organization as well as inconsistencies in accountability and clarity regarding the company's future direction.

Why Strategic Plans Fail

There are seven reasons why most strategic plans fail:

1. Lack of focus. Often, people get lost in the semantics of defining their vision, mission and values. They spend so much time and effort trying to understand what those terms mean and how they fit together that by the time they have it all figured out, they're mentally fatigued and the planning process stalls.

2. Lack of resources. Some companies run out of resources before they can get to a practical plan. They have a certain amount of time and money budgeted for the process and when this is spent, the process stops advancing.

3. Lack of understanding. Other people confuse strategic planning with operational planning. They focus on financial numbers, looking at what the numbers were for the past three years and then extrapolating from that. As a result, the planning becomes a matter of establishing financial targets and budgets into the future rather than having a dynamic debate about the larger strategic issues that are critical to the organization's success.

4. Lack of accountability. Sometimes the strategic planning process becomes too political and there's too much turf or budget protecting. As a result, the group cannot deal with the real issues at hand.

5. Lack of follow up. Many times strategic planning fails because there's little or no follow up to ensure that the plan is executed. The plan is in a notebook, but sitting on the shelf gathering dust.

6. Suffocating management styles. When a strategic planning session is simply an opportunity for the CEO or some other powerful leader to give a "state of the union" speech and pass along the new edicts, it isn't strategic planning. Instead, the planning has already taken place somewhere else. In today's increasingly complex marketplace, a strategic plan created by one person is probably lacking the depth of expertise, insight and review required for success.

7. Lack of flexibility. Finally, strategic plans don't work because the circumstances change and the plan becomes obsolete. The fact is that the strategy can be right today but wrong tomorrow because of external factors.

Three Phases to Successful Strategic Planning

The key to making strategic planning work is to think about it as being three distinct phases of a never ending process. Specifically:

• The first phase is "intuitive thinking," and it answers the bigger questions such as, "Why are we in business? Who are our customers? What do they want from us? What matters most to us? What are the values that we want to drive the way we do our business? Where do we see our company going in the future?" These are big picture, intuitive, and often emotionally loaded questions.

• The second phase is long-range planning. It's about understanding such things as where your company fits in the marketplace, what your strengths are as an organization, where your limitations are, and how you relate to customers and competitors. It also includes understanding the regulatory environment, where technology is taking you, and how major trends affect you. So it is data driven, very analytical and much more comparative.

• The third phase is operational planning. During this phase it's a matter of understanding what you really have the bandwidth to do so you don't over commit yourself. Now is the time to get practical with a plan for implementing and executing on specific priorities, which includes understanding who is responsible for what, what guidelines they're going to be functioning under, what resources they're going to have available to them, and what milestones or review points you need to have along the way to make sure everyone is staying on schedule.

Create Your Future Today

Effective leaders realize they can't work on all three planning phases at the same time. Each phase builds upon the last to create the proper focus and mindset to make strategic planning successful.

When strategic planning is viewed as an ongoing process rather than an event, effective and dynamic strategy is woven into the organization's culture. And that's when progress really happens—when strategic thinking, long-range and operational planning are a vital and ongoing part of the way the organization creates a better future.

Ron Price is founder, president and CEO of Price Associates. As a transformation specialist, he speaks to organizations around the world on such topics as strategic planning, business innovation, organizational growth, leadership integrity and talent management.