Why Most Strategic Plans Fail — and What to Do About It
Here is an uncomfortable truth: most strategic plans fail. Research consistently shows that somewhere between 60% and 90% of strategic plans never get fully executed. The plans themselves may be beautifully formatted and logically sound, but they sit on shelves gathering dust while the organization continues operating on autopilot.
Why? Because traditional strategic planning often suffers from a fundamental problem: it is a top-down exercise that produces a document rather than shared understanding. A small group of senior leaders retreats to a conference room, debates priorities, and emerges with a plan that the rest of the organization had no hand in creating and little motivation to execute.
Strategic Knowledge Mapping (SKM) takes a fundamentally different approach. Developed by systems scientist Steven E. Wallis, PhD, and adapted for business strategic planning by Kent E. Frese, PhD, SKM is a visual, collaborative process that turns strategic planning into something teams actually enjoy doing — and produces plans they actually follow through on.
What Is Strategic Knowledge Mapping?
At its core, SKM is a structured method for making the invisible visible. Every organization operates on a set of assumptions about what matters, what causes what, and where to focus effort. The problem is that these assumptions usually live inside individual heads, unexamined and unshared. Different leaders may hold fundamentally different mental models of how the business works — and never realize it until those models collide during a crisis.
SKM brings these mental models out into the open through a collaborative mapping process. Teams work together to build a visual map of their strategic landscape — identifying the key issues, drawing the connections between them, and discovering where focused effort will create the greatest impact. The result is not just a plan, but a shared understanding of how your business actually works as a system.
The methodology is grounded in Integrative Propositional Analysis (IPA), a research framework for measuring how well the pieces of any conceptual system fit together. In plain terms: IPA measures whether your strategic thinking is fragmented (a collection of disconnected ideas) or integrated (a coherent system where the pieces reinforce each other). Organizations with more integrated strategic thinking consistently outperform those with fragmented approaches.
The SKM Process: How It Works
One of the things that makes SKM distinctive is that it feels more like a game than a planning exercise. The process uses specific terminology that keeps participants engaged and creates a shared language for strategic thinking.
Step 1: Identify Your Points of Interest (POIs)
The process begins with participants individually identifying the key concepts, challenges, opportunities, and realities facing the organization. These are called Points of Interest — or POIs. Think of them as the important landmarks on your strategic map.
POIs might include things like:
- Customer retention challenges
- Talent pipeline gaps
- Technology modernization needs
- Market expansion opportunities
- Cash flow constraints
- Competitive threats
- Culture and engagement issues
Every participant contributes POIs, which means the map reflects the full range of perspectives in the room — not just the loudest voices or the most senior titles. This alone is a significant departure from traditional planning, where agenda-setting power typically flows from the top down.
Step 2: Draw the Causeways
Next, participants draw Causeways — arrows that show how one POI influences or causes another. This is where the real strategic thinking begins. Instead of treating issues in isolation, teams start seeing the connections between them.
For example, a team might draw a causeway from “talent pipeline gaps” to “customer retention challenges,” recognizing that understaffing leads to service quality problems that drive customers away. Another causeway might connect “technology modernization” to “operational efficiency,” showing how investment in one area creates benefits in another.
The act of drawing these connections forces teams to articulate assumptions that usually go unspoken. When one leader sees a strong causal link that another leader does not recognize, the resulting conversation often surfaces the most important strategic insights of the entire process.
Step 3: Find the Gold Stars
Gold Stars are POIs where multiple causeways converge — the issues that sit at the intersection of many cause-and-effect relationships. These are your high-impact strategic priorities, revealed by the structure of the map itself rather than by opinion or hierarchy.
Gold Stars often surprise teams. The issue that dominates most meeting agendas may turn out to have relatively few connections, while a less-discussed factor — say, internal communication processes or middle-management development — emerges as a Gold Star because it influences almost everything else on the map.
This is one of the most powerful aspects of SKM: it lets the data (the map structure) drive prioritization rather than relying on gut feel or political dynamics.
Step 4: Trace the Beltways
Beltways are feedback loops — circular chains of cause and effect where A influences B, B influences C, and C comes back around to influence A. Beltways can be reinforcing (virtuous or vicious cycles) or balancing (self-correcting systems).
Identifying beltways is critical because they explain why some problems keep coming back no matter how many times you address them, and why some positive changes create momentum that accelerates over time. A vicious beltway might show how employee turnover leads to overwork for remaining staff, which leads to burnout, which leads to more turnover. A virtuous one might show how investing in employee development leads to better performance, which leads to better client outcomes, which leads to revenue growth that funds more development.
Understanding your beltways tells you which cycles to break and which to accelerate — insight that is nearly impossible to gain from traditional linear planning.
Step 5: Identify Leverage Points
The final step brings everything together. Leverage Points are the strategic priorities where focused effort will create the greatest systemic impact — the places where a push in the right direction will ripple through multiple causeways, activate virtuous beltways, and address multiple Gold Star issues simultaneously.
Leverage points are the answer to the question every leadership team asks: “If we can only focus on a few things, what should they be?” SKM answers this question with structural evidence rather than opinion.
Why SKM Works: The Science of Shared Mental Models
The effectiveness of SKM is rooted in research on shared mental models — the degree to which team members hold compatible understandings of how their environment works. Decades of research in organizational psychology shows that teams with stronger shared mental models coordinate more effectively, make better decisions under pressure, and adapt faster to changing circumstances.
Traditional strategic planning often fails precisely because it does not build shared mental models. A small group creates the plan, then “communicates” it to everyone else through presentations and documents. But reading a plan is not the same as understanding the thinking behind it. SKM solves this by making the entire team co-authors of the strategic map. When people help build the model, they understand it intuitively — and they are invested in making it work.
The visual nature of the map is also critical. Research in cognitive science consistently shows that spatial representations improve understanding of complex relationships. A strategic map that you can see, point to, and discuss is fundamentally more useful than a 30-page document that lives in a shared drive.
SKM in Practice: What Teams Experience
A typical SKM engagement runs over four collaborative sessions of about 90 minutes each, facilitated by an experienced strategic planning consultant. Here is what the experience looks like:
Session 1: Landscape Mapping. The team identifies POIs individually, then shares and consolidates them into a master list. This session alone often produces “aha” moments as leaders realize how differently they see the same organization.
Session 2: Connection Building. The team draws causeways between POIs, debating and discussing each proposed connection. The facilitator ensures that all voices are heard and that the map reflects genuine team thinking rather than deference to authority.
Session 3: Pattern Recognition. The team analyzes the emerging map for Gold Stars, Beltways, and Leverage Points. This is typically the most energizing session — teams often describe the feeling of suddenly “seeing the whole picture” for the first time.
Session 4: Strategy Formation. With leverage points identified, the team develops strategic initiatives, assigns ownership, and creates accountability structures. Because the entire team participated in building the map, buy-in is already built into the process.
In one engagement, a catering company brought 11 team members through the SKM process. The visual map revealed strategic connections that previous planning efforts had missed entirely. The team left with a shared strategic vision and clear priorities — and went on to achieve record-breaking quarters. The difference was not just better strategy; it was the shared understanding and collective ownership that SKM creates.
When to Use SKM
SKM is particularly powerful in situations where:
- The team is stuck. If previous planning efforts have produced plans that go nowhere, SKM's fresh approach often breaks the logjam.
- Perspectives are fragmented. When different leaders or departments hold fundamentally different views of organizational priorities, SKM makes those differences visible and productive.
- Engagement matters. If you need the entire leadership team (not just the CEO) bought into the strategic direction, SKM's collaborative process delivers.
- Complexity is high. When the organization faces interconnected challenges that resist simple cause-and-effect analysis, SKM's systems approach reveals patterns that linear planning misses.
- You want visual clarity. If your team responds better to visual models than written documents, the strategic map becomes a living reference that guides decision-making long after the planning sessions end.
SKM as Part of a Broader Strategic Planning Toolkit
At TeamLMI, we view SKM as one of several evidence-based approaches to strategic planning, each suited to different organizational contexts. The Strategic Foundation Approach provides the structured, sequential methodology that works well for organizations doing strategic planning for the first time. Client-Centric Journey Design is ideal when strategy needs to be driven by deep understanding of the client experience. Resilient Future Planning uses scenario analysis for organizations facing significant uncertainty.
SKM stands out when the goal is not just a plan but a fundamental shift in how the leadership team thinks together about their business. The visual map, the shared vocabulary (POIs, Causeways, Gold Stars, Beltways, Leverage Points), and the collaborative process create something that traditional planning rarely achieves: a team that does not just have a strategy, but genuinely understands it.
The Legacy of Systems Thinking in Business Strategy
SKM represents an important bridge between academic systems science and practical business application. The methodology builds on decades of research into how complex systems behave — from the feedback loops that drive organizational dynamics to the structural properties that determine whether a strategy is robust or fragile.
Steven Wallis's contribution was the rigorous analytical framework — Integrative Propositional Analysis — that gives SKM its scientific foundation. His research demonstrated that the structural properties of conceptual systems (how well-connected and integrated they are) predict their practical effectiveness. This insight transforms strategic planning from an exercise in opinion-gathering to a structured process with measurable quality indicators.
The adaptation of these principles for business strategic planning has produced a methodology that is both intellectually rigorous and genuinely engaging — a combination that is rare in the strategic planning world. The methodology is documented in Wallis & Frese (2020), “Reaching Goals with Structured Strategic Plans,” published in the Handbook of Systems Sciences (Springer).
“The best strategic plans are not documents — they are shared mental models that live in the minds of everyone who helped create them.”
Interested in exploring Strategic Knowledge Mapping for your organization? Contact TeamLMI to discuss how SKM and our other strategic planning methodologies can help your leadership team build strategy that actually gets executed.