A plan will only succeed when there is strong leadership to get workers on board and present a clear vision of the future.

The first step in making a good movie is getting everyone involved to be making the same movie. ”

- Francis Ford Coppola (film producer)

Movies are big, messy, one-off projects, but with a great leader like Francis Ford Coppola, they get made brilliantly. Organizations face even bigger challenges. They can spend millions every year on strategic planning, but have little to show for it. Strategies are supposed to rally and unite people, but too often, incoherence and politics displace alignment and engagement. One of our long-time clients once said: “Strategic planning – that’s when you go off at the beginning of the year and agree on the organizational priorities, and then go back to work and do what you were going to do anyway.”

So what’s the problem? Many leaders and managers focus on the wrong things because they do not understand what makes their people tick. Here are two dangerous underlying myths about strategic planning:

Myth #1: The effectiveness of a strategy depends on the accuracy and validity of its content

Most leaders and managers believe that if they get the objectives right and make sure everyone in the organization understands them their strategy will work. So they analyze, research, and benchmark their industry, competitors, and market. Then, based on this work, they craft a vision and objectives that they believe are most accurate, sometimes with the help of expensive outside experts. (Everyone knows that the more you pay for advice, the more accurate it must be.) Finally, they inform the troops through elaborate communication schemes, confident that their approach is bulletproof, and will ensure that their people are genuinely on board and committed to the robust new strategy.

Unfortunately, this approach rarely works. When we observe organizations, people’s behaviour seems disconnected from the strategy. They may occasionally present it on PowerPoint, but mostly, they don’t remember it, they aren’t passionate about it, and it doesn’t shape their decisions, priorities, or actions.

Any strategy is only as good as people’s relationship with it. Even the most accurate and well-crafted strategy will fail if people don’t own it and aren’t accountable for it. On the other hand, even an adequate strategy is much more likely to succeed when people truly feel a sense of ownership and commitment toward it. Leaders who want to generate total alignment and engagement have to address not just the content of the strategy, but the context in which it has to be executed. This means fostering an environment of authentic and courageous communication and ownership. Only in such an environment can people address the real issues and truly commit their hearts and minds to the work at hand.

Myth #2: The more you can predict the future, the better your strategy will be

Most leaders and managers approach strategic planning from the past. They examine and benchmark their own as well as their competitors’ past performance and trends and analyze their current environment. Then they extrapolate a goal into the future. They may have “best,” “worst,” and “most likely” case scenarios, but all are based on history.

In today’s difficult economic environment, this approach most often leads to what can’t be done, how difficult things will be, and how the outlook for growth and success are bleak. The problem with this type of thinking is that it becomes self-fulfilling. How many times have we been shaken out of our certainties about the future by unforeseen events? The most immediate examples are the tech bubble, the housing bubble, and the recent collapse of the financial sector.

The more you try to predict the future by analyzing the past, the more you are stuck in it. Of course, you need a healthy respect for and understanding of the past. But as Alan Kay (an ex-Apple Fellow) said: “The only way to predict the future is to create it.”

The most powerful and effective strategies are informed by the past, but invented from the future. This means a team or organization envisions the future, takes a stand, and commits to a direction and destination as a responsible, plausible, and calculated risk. Then everyone commits to that destination – not because it is completely accurate, but because they believe it is the right future to pursue.

When a team or organization aligns around a bold and compelling future, people rise to the occasion and give it their all. They collaborate, communicate, share information, and look out for each other.

Strategic planning is not an accounting and forecasting exercise; it’s a leadership exercise in getting everyone on the same page. One requires a calculator. The other requires courage.