Why did your last strategic plan die?
Plans stall where alignment breaks. The Strategy Graveyard runs a free, 10-question autopsy on your last plan, shows where it lost alignment, and gives you the fix for each cause before you write the next one.
Why it matters
It is October. Your leadership team is about to set the 2027 plan, and the 2026 plan is the best evidence you have of how the next one will run.
A plan delivers results when the people who run it pull in the same direction: one short list, one owner per priority, every department carrying a goal from it, a regular review, and the money to match. Break any link and the plan stalls, however good the ideas in it.
What you get
A score out of 100 for how executable your last plan was.
The cause of death: which of five alignment breaks stopped it.
A drift map of which departments the plan reached, set to your type of business.
The fix for each cause, with what it is worth to your business and to your leadership team.
A headstone to share, and the full result by email for your leadership team.
Where it breaks
A strategic plan can stall in five places, and each one leaves evidence you can check.
Focus
More priorities than the leadership team can hold, and nothing named to stop.
Ownership
Priorities held by a committee, or orphaned when an owner changed role.
Translation
Departments outside the room carried no goals tied to the plan.
Rhythm
Leadership stopped opening the plan, so slips surfaced at year-end.
Realism
Budget and hiring were set apart from the priorities they had to fund.
How it works
Three short pages, two questions per cause. Each answer carries fixed points, up to 10 per question, so the total runs to 100. Each cause scores out of 20 on a three-level scale: stalled, at risk or holding. The lowest becomes the cause of death.
One question maps seven departments. You pick your type of business first, so the departments fit it. For each one you mark whether it helped build the plan and whether it carried goals tied to it. That produces the drift map: aligned, agreed with no goals, goals with no buy-in, or dark.
Every cause comes with its fix. The change to make, what it is worth to the business, and what it is worth to your leadership team.
Scoring runs in your browser on a fixed rubric. The same answers always give the same score. The plan name you type for your headstone stays on your device unless you ask for an emailed copy.
By the numbers
Questions
Causes of death scored
Departments on the drift map
Who decides
The score is arithmetic. Every point traces to one of your answers.
What the next plan does differently is a call for you and your leadership team. The autopsy names where the last one stalled; it does not write the next one.
When to use it
You are heading into 2027 planning and want the old plan's lessons on the table first.
Your last plan is alive on paper, and nobody on the leadership team runs on it.
A new executive has joined and asks how the last plan went.
Free, 10 questions. Then run HorizonAxis, the Strategic Profile Snapshot, ~9 min, to read where your company stands today.
Go deeper
Each cause draws on published work on strategy and execution. Focus draws on Rumelt (2011). Ownership and Rhythm draw on McChesney et al. (2012). Translation draws on Akao (1991), Grove (1983) and Doerr (2018). Realism draws on Kaplan and Norton (1992).
References
Akao, Y. (Ed.). (1991). Hoshin kanri: Policy deployment for successful TQM (G. H. Mazur & Japan Business Consultants, Ltd., Trans.). Productivity Press.
Doerr, J. (2018). Measure what matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation rock the world with OKRs. Portfolio/Penguin.
Grove, A. S. (1983). High output management. Random House.
Kaplan, R. S., & Norton, D. P. (1992). The balanced scorecard—Measures that drive performance. Harvard Business Review, 70(1), 71–79. https://hbr.org/1992/01/the-balanced-scorecard-measures-that-drive-performance-2
McChesney, C., Covey, S., & Huling, J. (2012). The 4 disciplines of execution: Achieving your wildly important goals. Free Press.
Rumelt, R. P. (2011). Good strategy, bad strategy: The difference and why it matters. Crown Business.
Strategize. Cascade. Execute.
Comments