Every serious organization knows that strategy matters. They convene teams, commission consultants, and produce impressive slide decks. And yet, despite the energy and expertise invested, most strategic initiatives stall. In their 2020 analysis, global strategy consulting firm Bridges Consultancy found that 48% of strategies fail (thankfully down from 90% in 2004) but 85% of organizations still fail to achieve at least 67% of their strategies (Bridges, 20-Year Results From Surveying Strategic Implementation p. 5). This isn’t because the people in the room lack intelligence or ambition. It’s because moving a group is not the same as moving a plan. Strategy is a social act, not a technical one. And if you’ve ever tried to coordinate a thoughtful, well-meaning team toward a decisive action, you already know: you can’t walk a cat. Cats are smart, capable, and responsive, but they don’t move in straight lines, and they don’t go just because you say so. Neither do humans in groups. If we want to make progress, we need a different approach.
This insight wasn’t born in theory, it was forged in practice. Over twenty years of leading strategic offsites and high-stakes decision processes at Convene Lab, we hear the same client histories again and again. Our insight is that strategy doesn’t fail in the design, it fails in the room. The goals are clear, the people competent, the context urgent and still, decisions are avoided, conflict is smoothed over, and alignment is deferred. Irving Janis captured one version of this in Victims of Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (1972), where high-cohesion groups suppress dissent to maintain unity, leading to flawed choices. But group dysfunction isn’t always dramatic, it’s often quiet. It’s a room full of nodding heads and no clear choice. The problem isn’t malice. It’s that group behavior is emergent: shaped by unspoken norms, fear of conflict, and status dynamics that no planning framework can resolve on its own.
This article makes 3 claims:
Groups behave differently than individuals and their behavior often defies simple control
Most strategic planning efforts assume a level of coherence that rarely exists
Facilitation is the missing structure, it is not a soft skill, but a discipline that enables movement by designing how groups think and decide
First, groups are boundedly rational. Herbert A. Simon, in Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organizations (1947), introduced the concept of bounded rationality, showing that even individual decisions are shaped by limited attention, incomplete information, and cognitive shortcuts. In groups, these limitations don’t cancel out, they intensify. Second, group decision-making doesn’t naturally lead to better outcomes unless designed carefully. Cass R. Sunstein and Reid Hastie, in Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter (2015), demonstrate that while groups can outperform individuals, they only do so when structured to surface dissent, diversify input, and mitigate conformity. Without facilitation, those conditions rarely occur. Third, facilitation provides the architecture groups need to decide by structuring when voices are heard, how tension is managed, and when closure is reached. It doesn’t control the group, it frees it to act.
Some argue that a strong leader can overcome group drift with charisma and decisiveness, a view articulated in Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus’s Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge (1985), which portrays visionary leadership as the key to alignment. Others believe that smart teams, left alone, will self-organize and reach clarity, an assumption embedded in agile methodologies like Kenneth Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland’s The Scrum Guide (2017). Still others put their faith in frameworks like OKRs, SWOTs, cascading goals, as exemplified by John Doerr’s Measure What Matters (2018) and the widespread use of SWOT analysis, developed by Albert Humphrey at Stanford in the 1960s. But heroic leadership often collapses into performance without follow-through. Smart teams are just as vulnerable to politeness, fatigue, and tacit avoidance. And frameworks alone cannot rescue a group that hasn’t decided how it wants to decide. All of these strategies assume people will move on logic alone. But the cat will not walk, no matter how detailed the map.
If your team struggles to decide, if plans never quite take hold, it’s not a failure of will or intelligence. It’s a failure of design. You can’t walk a cat, but you can guide one, if you understand how it moves. Facilitation is not decoration. It is infrastructure. It is what turns collective intelligence into coherent motion when emotion, hierarchy, and complexity are all in the room. Strategy fails not because we’re wrong, but because we try to move without structure.
In a coming series of articles I’ll explore why traditional strategic planning so often stalls, and how facilitation provides the missing discipline for moving groups toward real decisions. The core thesis is simple: strategy fails not for lack of intelligence, but because groups are social systems and social systems require design. We’ll look at why plans aren’t decisions, why consensus isn’t clarity, how group norms suppress candor, and why frameworks alone rarely move the needle. From the emotional costs of disagreement to the architectural role of the facilitator, this series will unpack the hidden dynamics behind strategic paralysis and show what it takes to move the room.
Patrick Landers is VP of Strategy at Convene Lab, a strategy consultancy focused on strategic practice. Click here for a quick chat.