Every fall, leadership teams sit down to build next year's plan. The thinking is usually good. People disagree well. The whiteboard fills up. And by spring, a lot of those plans look like the plan from the year before. That isn't a thinking problem. It comes from how the plan got built. Most plans are built by addition: the team decides what it wants and writes it down, one reasonable item at a time. Five signs your plan was built by addition The same items show up two years

Watch a leadership team set priorities for the year and you will see a well-run process. Discussion. Debate. Real thought about what matters. A short list at the end, usually 3 or 4 priorities, and genuine commitment to it. Now watch the same team a year later. The list of the work that was prioritized has five things on it. Nobody remembers when the fourth and fifth arrived, and nobody removed anything to make room. That is the subtraction problem, and it is nearly universal

There is a particular meeting that every leadership team eventually sits in. The scoreboard says everyone won. The results say otherwise. Every department hit its goals. The company missed its year. Nobody in the room underperformed. Nobody slacked. And that is what makes it so disorienting, because the usual explanations do not apply. You cannot point at a person. There is no obvious failure to fix. Here is what is almost always going on. The Goals Were Reasonable. They Were