Eighty percent of business leaders believe their organizations are good at strategy. Only 44% believe they can do it. That separation, between the confidence used in planning and the reality of the results, is where many growth plans fail. Not in execution. In thoughts that have never been tested before the killing begins.
Nicholas Mukhtar, advisor business owners, family offices, and corporate executives through his company Tera Strategies, has a specific diagnosis of why growth plans fail. Failure, as he sees it, rarely begins in the operational phase. It comes from the editing room, from unasked questions, and from believing that those being asked are the wrong ones.
Confidence Gap
The details of how leaders actually approach planning are amazing. Research cited by ClearPoint Strategy found that only 2% of leaders are confident that they will achieve 80 to 100% of their stated goals. That drop in confidence – from 80% believing the program is sound to 2% believing they will fully deliver on it – is not the finger of a culture of murder. Imaginary fingerprints have over-promised from the start.
Nicholas Mukhtar points out the difference that finds why treating this as an execution problem can be misleading. A program built on an inaccurate reading of a company’s true capabilities, market position, or internal culture is not one that has failed. It didn’t work. The killing reveals a gap, but the gap was already there.
“Every organization and every person is different, and you have to treat it that way,” Mukhtar said. “There is no one-size-fits-all solution.” For leaders who use pre-built growth frameworks, whether market expansion games or product diversification models, without first assessing the pressures of those frameworks against their specific context, confidence in the planning phase becomes a problem rather than a protection.
A study cited by ClearPoint Strategy found that 67% of well-designed plans fail during implementation, and that 61% of managers feel unprepared for the challenges they face when entering a new role. For Nicholas Mukhtar, both figures point to the same root: the editorial process did not reveal what was really true about the organization, the people within it, or the circumstances in which it operated.
When Ideas Fall
Harvard Business Review research by Andrea Belk Olson identifies four recurring patterns in which business plans fall into the planning phase rather than the execution phase. Leaders misread the real problem they are trying to solve. They overestimate what the organization can actually deliver. Fixed barriers that no effort can move without testing. And the question of how people within the organization will respond is rarely asked until it is necessary.
Each of these is a failure of thought, not a failure of action. The system looks perfect because the right questions about each section are never asked, or asked hopefully rather than harshly.
Nicholas Mukhtar’s system-level domain, developed by using runs a non-profit public health organizationadvising government agencies, and working with private sector clients through Tera Strategies, gives him some perspective on how these issues intersect. “I see growing pains in companies trying to transition from a startup to a fully operational business,” he said. For many of the business owners I work with, the growth plan was for the company they wanted to be, not the company they currently are.
That distance, between the prescribed version of the organization and its actual state, is where most systems break down. A business owner who runs a tight, founder-led operation may think that a team can carry out a comprehensive program without the infrastructure to support it. A company moving from one market to several may assume that what worked in the first instance will transfer cleanly to the next. These are not careless mistakes. They are the natural result of programming within a system that is too close to see.
“There is a lot of skepticism about companies using McKinsey and external consultants,” said Mukhtar, “but the idea is sound: you bring an outside voice that is not focused on a day-to-day basis, and who can think creatively.” That level of creativity is not about details or structures. It’s about the ability to question assumptions that feel obvious within the organization – and that feel obvious because everyone else inside has stopped asking them.
Stress Testing Before the First Dollar Goes
The solution Nicholas Mukhtar describes is not to add more steps to the planning process. It’s about changing the shape of what already exists: from building a case for order to trying to break it.
Many planning sessions, by design, are constructive. Teams gather evidence to support direction, build convincing financial models, and present to leadership in a way that emphasizes top-down. The assumptions that underpin the model remain in the background, rarely appearing and rarely challenged. That is not a process failure. It’s about culture – and Harvard Business School data cited in HBR found that 85% of senior leadership teams spend less than one hour a month discussing strategy, while 50% spend no time at all. When little time comes to honest observation, the assumptions in the system are not challenged until a failed attempt is discovered.
When the people expected to drive the program forward are not involved in stress testing, the organization is committing itself to something it has not honestly tested. The answer, as Nicholas Mukhtar outlines, begins with the simple questions asked earlier. “People are pulled in so many different directions that they just need to simplify things and have a straight conversation: why isn’t this working? What’s bothering you? How do we make it better?” Mukhtar said. That concept, compressing complexity into specific questions, is a neat map of how growth plans must be challenged before they are implemented. What can’t we do that this program thinks we can? What do we consider moving that will not move? What does this look like if the guess is 20% wrong?
Nicholas Mukhtar work with business owners it tends to start directly at this point: not with the growth plan itself, but with the reality of the operation behind it. The real volume of the team, the client relationships that really strengthen the income, the internal forces that will absorb the change or resist it. Programs will focus after those questions have reliable answers, not before.
None of these require a detailed approach. It takes a willingness to challenge the system before committing, rather than after failure. For business owners who have experienced stagnant growth for no apparent reason, the pattern is consistent: execution was rarely the problem. An untested assumption was.
