In the article Rethinking Strategic Planning Part 1: Pitfalls and Fallacies, Henry Mintzberg gives a detailed explanation about some of the most common pitfalls or obstacles companies or organizations must face in order to accomplish an appropriate strategic planning process. Also in the article, fallacies related to strategic planning are analyzed in order to make misunderstood concepts clear.

The first obstacle is the “Commitment”. It states that it is important that the planning is committed to the management and to the process of strategy making. Also it is necessary that the whole organization including the top managers are involved in the situation maybe they won’t be able to know every detail but they should be able to understand the whole picture. The next pitfall is “Change” and the main issue is that even planning the strategy for the company resist to change because it would imply to rearrange all the current structures of the organization. Finally the other obstacle mentioned in the article is “Politics” and to be able to overcome this obstacle it is necessary that the people’s beliefs are aligned with the objectives of the company so that all the strategic planning process goals can be achieved.

However as Mintzberg mentions in his article these are not the real problems, the important things that need to be fixed lie deeper and those are explained with the three fallacies he propose: Predetermination, Detachment, and Formalization.

The first one talks about how an organization should be able to control its environment in order to make predictions on what is going to happen and create an appropriate strategy. However new strategies can appear at any time in the organization therefore you need to be prepared but the problem is as Mintzberg says “If strategies represent stability, then strategy making is interference” because of the dynamic and constant change of the world we are at.

The fallacy of Detachment talks about that an organization must be able to separate the strategies from the operations in order to control the whole system from a higher point of view and be able to control it. This will enable the senior managers to be informed about the details of the organization without having to directly observe every single process that needs a strategic plan. The problem here is the lack of specific detailed data that would be needed to analyze the whole system.

Finally the fallacy of Formalization talks about determining the real capabilities of the organization so that every strategy created for it can actually work or recreate the process it is supposed to. Many organizations think they have created the ideal strategy to achieve their objectives however in most cases the people who create this strategy does not understand the whole organization as a system and may ask for “impossible goals”.

Consulted Source:

Henry Mintzberg. Rethinking Strategic Planning Part 1: Pitfalls and Fallacies. Long Range Planning Vol. 27, No. 3 pp. 12 to 21, 1994. Consulted on August 17 th, 2014. http://www.mintzberg.org/sites/default/files/rethinking_strategic_planning_1.pdf