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initiative failure Initiatives are your efforts to achieve your goals and vision. They often involve change. Change to the company, its people, and to themselves. Despite your best intentions, initiatives will fail. May they be strategies, programs, or projects, success shouldn’t be expected or assumed. Success is fought for. The bigger the initiative, the bigger the failure, the bigger the fight to turn things around. You can’t prevent failure. You can, however, change its timing, reduce its impact, and accelerate through it. The more you know how your initiatives will fail, the more scenarios you have for failure mitigation.

 

inherited initiatives

Despite each vision being unique, initiatives are often not designed to support them. Designs are frequently inherited. They are inherited from previous efforts, from advisory firms, from industry peers, and from what was discussed at seminars. By design, inherited initiatives do not reflect the nuances in your company or how your people work. Failure occurs because to make things work, significant concessions have to be made.

        pushing a boulder up a hill; or
        stealing from Peter to feed Paul

designed initiatives

When initiatives are designed, they reflect the designers’ priorities, work styles, and behaviors. These often do not match the priorities, work styles, and behaviors of those in the work environment. This mismatch leads to more effort with less impact. People fail at doing what they don’t believe in. People fail at doing what they don’t do. Failure accumulates with too much budget burn and too much resource burnout.

        80% of the budget accounts for
        20% of the results