Perhaps more interesting than the plan that is not implemented because no one cares about it, is the plan that people do care about, but that turns out to be ‘‘un-implementable.’’
Our studies have identified several incidences of this phenomenon.
In many cases,the un-implementability of the plan is somehow embedded in the way the plan was produced. One dynamic that often tends to generate un-implementable plans emerges from situations where strategic decisions need to be legitimated through extensive participation of different groups of stakeholders who fundamentally disagree. This was the case of a major teaching hospital that had recently undergone a merger and was attempting to generate a strategic plan to reconfigure services across its three sites.
Everyone wanted a solution, since the success of the merger would lead to an influx of financial and reputational resources. However, no one in the hospital had sufficient power to impose a solution–—the only route to progress was through negotiation. And negotiate they did. One of us was privileged to observe several phases ofthese negotiations, all aimed at generating a plan that participants could sign off on.
They did sign off–—but only after the project had been transformed into something that everyone knew was vague,ambitious and entirely unrealistic because as one manager put it, ‘‘We had to please everyone.’’