By it’s very definition strategic planning is high level and longer term.  This means the benefits derived from the plan can be some time in coming.

Lip Service

It never ceases to amaze me that people often discuss strategy and how strategic their approach is only to immediately turn around and react to a situation without consideration of the long term effects.   Strategies don’t work if they are just mouthed as meaningless parables to impress the followers.

Driven by Instant Gratification

So often our behaviors are driven by the need for immediate results.  We need to do it now and get our reward.  Sadly this approach is often likely to produce lower quality and less effective results.  This is not just my opinion – there are a multitude of studies on this topic, all consistent in the conclusion that strategic approaches are more likely to produce consistent high returns (just use a search engine like google to uncover a myriad of these kinds of studies)

It’s our own fault

You have probably heard this before, ” you get what you reward”.   Most often we are likely to recognize immediate behaviors and long term actions get lost under the radar.  No reward, no recognition leads to the question, why bother?

There are rare examples of corporate and other organization leaders going against this natural behavior with fabulous long term results but it is hard to do.  Just consider the way we track things, i.e.,  monthly reports, quarterly reports, annual reviews, etc.    Certainly there are cases where long term achievements are captured and analyzed but this is more the exception than the rule.

Most puzzling to me is this approach to long term over short term gratification is intuitive and logical, somehow though it is not embedded into our basic human behavior.