Most organizations don't suffer from a lack of plans, they suffer from a lack of decisions. The shelves are full of slide decks, roadmaps, and strategic frameworks. But when the moment comes to commit, to say yes to one thing and no to another, the air often thins. The plan exists, but the decision hasn’t happened. This disconnect isn’t harmless, it quietly drains trust, wastes time, and spreads organizational fatigue. Even worse, it turns the organization against itself, as part of the organization attempts to execute the plan while another part resists, at which point the biblical exhortation about a house divided against itself foretells the inevitable result. Teams begin to sense that nothing is real until it’s urgent, and everything agreed to is negotiable. Resumes get updated. In this article, I want to show why planning is often used to avoid decision-making, and why facilitation is what reintroduces real choice into the room.
This insight emerges not in the analysis phase, but in the follow-through, or more precisely, the lack of it. People have met. Stakeholders have nodded. Frameworks have been populated. But even after all this, when asked, “What exactly was decided?,” the room goes quiet. This aligns with the critique made by Henry Mintzberg in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994) where he argues that strategy cannot be captured in static documents; it is a pattern of behavior shaped by real-time choices. A plan is a record of intent. A decision is a boundary. Many confuse the two.
This article makes three claims:
Plans are often mistaken for decisions - when in fact they frequently mask indecision
This confusion creates execution failures, because no one knows what is actually committed
Facilitation restores decision integrity, by naming tradeoffs, sequencing actions, and surfacing avoidance
A plan can be crafted without any real disagreement being resolved. That’s what makes it seductive. It feels productive without requiring sacrifice. But real strategy, as Richard Rumelt argued in Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (2011), involves choice, which means saying no to some things in order to prioritize others. Without choosing, plans become catalogs of aspirations. And the surest tell that a decision hasn’t truly been made? No one will say what is being stopped. The refusal to name what will no longer be funded, supported, or pursued, especially when it involves longstanding initiatives or powerful champions, is the hallmark of strategic avoidance. In nearly every strategic session I’ve either led or been a part of, someone inevitably asks, sometimes politely, sometimes pointedly - “So if this isn’t in our plan, what does that mean?” Often, it’s not really a question. It’s a challenge, a warning, a quiet test of whether the group is serious. Sometimes it can even be a none-too-subtle calling-out of leadership itself, an unspoken probe into whether today is the day when they are actually making this decision, and whether they understand the consequences . . . This resistance isn’t always political, it can be psychological. As Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated in Prospect Theory (1979), people are more sensitive to immediate losses than to equivalent gains and even more so to speculative future gains. Ending a legacy program, even one that no longer fits, can also feel like a loss of identity or status, so it remains, unchallenged, in the plan. We can all personally relate to failure or a disappointing change in circumstances. But to succeed in the future, the only choice is to decide at what speed we want to move on. Facilitation is what enables the group as a whole to cross that threshold: to name endings with clarity and respect, and to finally move forward.
Some argue that planning is deciding, if people contribute to a plan, they’re implicitly agreeing to act. Indeed, it's an old sleight-of-hand to task known dissenters with drafting a plan to do what they don’t want to do, as if their association and participation in merely creating the plan is equal to their wholehearted commitment to execute it. In practice, this just moves the landmine a little further down the path to execution. Others suggest that organizations need to remain flexible, so hard commitments are counterproductive. And others delegate to dashboards and KPIs to signal what’s important. But shared input is not shared commitment. Flexibility without structure becomes drift. And metrics measure movement; they don’t create it. Without explicit decisions, you get ambiguity disguised as alignment, failure to commit disguised as avoiding failure. Only facilitation confronts the avoidance and makes the invisible line visible.
If your organization struggles with follow-through, the issue may not be execution, it may be a failure to truly decide. Plans feel safe. Decisions feel costly. But progress depends on tradeoffs, and tradeoffs must be named, the toll must be paid. Facilitation is not what happens once the plan is made, it’s what ensures the plan reflects real commitment. Without it, strategy becomes theatre. With it, execution thrives.
In the next article, I’ll explore why group intelligence is not the same as rationality, and how well-meaning teams often compound bias and avoidance without realizing it. This series continues to explore our core thesis: strategy fails not for lack of intelligence, but because groups are social systems and social systems require structure.
Patrick Landers is VP of Strategy at Convene Lab, a strategy consultancy focused on strategic practice. Click here for a quick chat.