Introduction

In many organisations, those members of the C-suite or Senior Management often are over-confident about their strategies believing firmly that they are doing the right thing.

However, in many organisations, those responsible for strategy typically fail. Retrospectively, it is sometimes clear why. Unfortunately, these same organisations do not actively look back and learn lessons. Instead, they continue implementing “bad” strategies and blame any failures on other circumstances or factors beyond their control.

This video by Mark Chussil demonstrates techniques for improving the way we think to help us improve how we develop (and then successfully deliver) strategy. If you’re interested in strategy and delivering real change, please watch the video and read the “citations” section for other information.

Why Strategies Fail

Watch Mark Chussil’s speech, “Why Strategies Fail: Human Strategists and Biased Tools,” delivered December 9, 2011, to the Chief Strategy Officers Summit in New York City, sponsored by The IE Group. Please see “Citations” below for material not visible on the slides.

Citations

The slides in the “Why Strategies Fail” speech contain citations for other’s work. Because the slides are not visible in the video, here are those citations.

• The 90% confidence quiz was inspired by a similar exercise in Decision Traps, an excellent book by Jay Russo and Paul Schoemaker.
• Quotations from Steve Burd of Safeway and Craig Herkert of Supervalu came from an article in The Wall Street Journal of October 16, 2009.
• Performance data from Safeway and Supervalu came from Fortune.com.
• The quotation at the end — “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well, I have others” — is from Groucho Marx.