Why Most Board-Approved Plans Never Deliver
Series: Strategy Without Illusion
Many boardrooms mistake agreement for alignment, and planning for strategy. This series explores why so many growth plans unravel and how non-execs, Chairs, and investors can protect clarity, challenge gently, and keep leadership focused on what really matters.
Part 1 – “Why Most board-Approved Plans never Deliver”.
The board pack’s clean. The numbers stack up. A few tweaks, and the plan is signed off.
Sometimes it follows a new investment. The thesis is solid. The excitement is real. Everyone nods, we’re backing the plan.
Other times, it’s just a fresh financial year and a budget that seems to make sense.
But a month in, delivery is already patchy. The team’s distracted, decisions slow, and energy fades. You can feel the early drag.
If you’ve seen this before, you’re not alone.
What looks like alignment at the top table often unravels because strategy was never actually created, only numbers were agreed.
This is the illusion of alignment. Everyone appears to agree, but beneath the surface, they’re moving in different directions.
How the Illusion Plays Out in Real Businesses
It’s subtle. There’s no argument. There’s agreement in the room, but confusion in the work. Strategy is implied, but not explored. Budget conversations pass as planning. Teams say “yes” to direction, but interpret it differently.
Often, the illusion of alignment shows up as:
- Agreement in meetings, misalignment in action
- Strategies filled with buzzwords and assumptions
- Teams aligned on the destination but holding different maps
Why It Happens
Most people don’t like friction. In the boardroom, that means opting for polite agreement rather than digging into difficult questions. Execs nod along because they don’t want to appear obstructive. Investors accept the nod as commitment. But no one checks whether the numbers actually map to deliverable activity.
There’s also a fundamental confusion between agreeing on the numbers and aligning on the plan.
Where I See It Most
In my experience as a non-exec chair and interim CEO, I rarely come across a business that has conducted a proper strategy session.
What happens more often is this: The FD or CFO drafts a budget, often based on what they think the board wants to see, and circulates it internally. With competing pressures and the daily operational demands, the executive team rushes to provide input so that the board pack can be finalised on time.
At the board meeting, the FD or CFO walks the board through the budget. A few tweaks are made. And that’s it, next year’s plan is signed off.
It’s a process driven by finance and deadlines, not strategy and clarity. The assumption is that because the numbers are agreed, the team is aligned. But beneath the surface, there’s often no shared sense of the operational path to deliver those numbers.
This disconnect, between a financial plan and an operational reality, is where the illusion of alignment quietly takes root.
Why Strategy Often Isn’t Written
There’s another issue too, one that’s rarely talked about. Many executive teams simply don’t know how to create a clear, operational strategy. They’ve seen 75-page documents created by consultants or academics, full of analysis, frameworks, and vision statements, but those plans almost never translate into day-to-day delivery.
And when the environment shifts, those same plans are too cumbersome to adjust. So a proper strategic plan is never written. What gets signed off is a financial projection, not a direction of travel. And the illusion deepens.
Strategy Ignores the Outside World
Even when a strategy is written, it’s often done in a vacuum. There’s no pressure testing. No external challenge. And no real attempt to answer the basics:
- What are our competitors prioritising?
- What are our customers asking for now, not last year?
- How are our suppliers behaving, and what risks or opportunities does that create?
- Are our pricing assumptions still realistic?
- Have market dynamics shifted in a way we haven’t acknowledged?
These questions aren’t advanced strategy. They’re the fundamentals. But they’re often left unanswered because the plan is shaped internally, and driven by financial targets, not market realities.
A proper strategic plan should begin with these basics. If they’re missing, you’re not building a strategy. You’re dressing up a forecast.
Strategy Doesn’t Need to Be Complicated
Strategy might sound grand, but at its core it’s simply a plan, a route from here to where you need to be.
Crafting one doesn’t require a two-day retreat or a 75-slide deck. With the right agenda and a clear hour-by-hour structure, I’ve seen exec teams build a strong, actionable strategy in a 4–5 hour session.
In every interim assignment I take on, I create a one-page strategy, yes, one page. It lays out the mission, the direction of travel, and the key initiatives that will get us there. It’s amazing how quickly that simple A4 sheet becomes a reference point for the entire business. It doesn’t need to be polished. It just needs to be clear.
Real Alignment Is a Rhythm
The real test of alignment isn’t whether the team agrees in the room, it’s whether they keep checking back against the strategy once the work begins.
One of the simplest questions a NED can ask is: “What’s your routine for staying aligned?” Where do you pause to reconnect with the plan? What triggers a reassessment?
With the one-page strategy I use, this becomes much easier. I tell teams: “If it’s not on the strategy sheet, we shouldn’t be doing it. And if we should be doing it, it should be on the strategy sheet.”
The structure is deliberately simple, but precise. At the top is the mission, which often includes the agreed financial target, so the commercial context is explicit. Below that are the objectives, the major segments of the numbers and any non-negotiable deliverables that must happen. Then finally, a short list of critical results, the strategic threads that progress the objectives and signal meaningful movement.
It’s always one page. It keeps the business focused. And because it sits in every board pack, the exec reports are written to align with it, or explain variances. That’s how clarity becomes culture.
Who Actually Knows the Plan?
Ask your exec team, individually, what this year’s mission and top objectives are. A fair few won’t be able to tell you. Some will say, “Do you mean the budget?”
And if you walk into the wider business, it’s the same. There may be a vision statement hanging in the hallway from that Investors in People effort ten years ago. But ask how it connects to today’s decisions, and you’ll get blank looks.
When the mission isn’t clear and current, resources scatter. Teams pull in different directions. And no one’s sure what the business is actually working towards.
The Role of the Touchline Leader
In the From the Touchline series, I wrote about how great leaders influence through clarity and timing, not volume or visibility. That same idea applies here. And as I noted in When to Step In, and When to Stay Out, General von Moltke understood that the best plans collapse without clear intent. What matters isn’t rigid control, it’s shared understanding.
Touchline leadership means protecting that understanding when the day-to-day work tries to dilute it.
The NED or investor on the touchline isn’t there to second-guess decisions, they’re there to sense when alignment is superficial. They’re there to test gently, to ask questions that reveal whether the plan is genuinely shared or simply accepted. It’s not enough to nod at the numbers, the NED needs to ask, “How exactly do we expect this to happen, and who’s driving it?”
This isn’t about tripping up management. It’s about avoiding the moment six months in when nobody owns the outcome, and everyone says “we thought we were doing that differently.”
What Real Alignment Sounds Like
Real alignment sounds uncomfortable. It includes phrases like:
- “This is what we’re not doing.”
- “Here’s what success won’t look like.”
- “If X happens, we’ll pause. If Y happens, we’ll push.”
It’s deliberate. It’s specific. And it usually needs repeating.
A Simple Prompt I Often Use
In sessions I lead, I’ll often ask each executive privately to write down what they think the mission and plan are. You’d be surprised how rarely the answers match.
One of the simplest ways I challenge the illusion is by asking each executive privately to write down what they think the mission and plan are. You’d be surprised how rarely the answers match. This isn’t about embarrassment. It’s about surfacing gaps early, before they turn into boardroom frustration or operational misfire.
Why It Matters
Alignment isn’t about agreement. It’s about coordinated action.
Numbers don’t deliver outcomes, teams do. And they need more than a spreadsheet to stay aligned.
Coordinated action only happens when everyone has the same picture of what matters, why it matters, and how it’s going to happen.
If you’re on the touchline, your job isn’t just to listen for what’s said in the meeting. It’s to sense what’s understood outside it.
That’s where real influence lives. And that’s where strategy becomes more than a slide deck.
When Potential Fades
This is also why so many businesses miss the chance to fly. They’re not failing because the original idea was wrong, they’re stuck doing what they’ve always done, even when it no longer fits.
The market moves, the model stays the same, and the cash runway shortens. After two or three years of missed targets, patience fades. Excitement gives way to fatigue. The business drifts quietly into the ‘basket case’ section of the portfolio.
But what about the initial excitement? The conviction behind the original investment thesis? Was that all an illusion too?
Or is it more likely that the execution never stood a chance, because real strategy was never built?
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