"How do we get buy-in?" is one of the most common questions I hear from leaders about to embark on strategic planning. It's the wrong question.
Buy-in means you've already decided what to do and now you need people to go along with it. It's a sales problem. And people can tell.
Ownership is different. Ownership means people helped create the thing, so they feel responsible for making it work — even when it's hard, even when they disagree with parts of it, even when nobody's watching.
The Authorship Principle
In my facilitation work, I operate from a simple principle: people support what they help create.
This doesn't mean every decision is made by committee or that leaders abdicate their judgment. It means the process of arriving at a strategy matters as much as the strategy itself. When people have genuinely wrestled with the tradeoffs, surfaced their concerns, and influenced the direction — they own the result in a way that no PowerPoint presentation could ever produce.
Why Buy-In Strategies Fail
The typical buy-in approach looks something like this: leadership develops a strategy (sometimes with consultant help), then "cascades" it through the organization with a series of town halls and talking points.
The problems are predictable. Staff nod politely but don't change their behavior. Middle managers translate the strategy into whatever they were already doing. The plan looks great on paper and changes nothing in practice.
This isn't because people are resistant to change. It's because they were never given the chance to think through the change themselves. They were given conclusions rather than the opportunity to reach conclusions.
Designing for Ownership
Creating ownership requires designing processes where participants do real intellectual work — not rubber-stamping predetermined outcomes. That means:
Letting groups generate options before leaders narrow them. When people see that their ideas were genuinely considered, they can accept decisions that go a different direction. When they suspect the decision was already made, even the "right" answer feels imposed.
Creating space for productive disagreement. If your strategic planning process felt harmonious from start to finish, it's likely that people self-censored. Real ownership requires real engagement with real tradeoffs.
Making the thinking visible. When a group can see how they got from point A to point B — the data they weighed, the alternatives they considered, the principles that guided the choice — they own not just the destination but the reasoning. And that reasoning becomes a tool they can use when conditions change.
The Test
Here's how you know whether you have buy-in or ownership: imagine the strategy hits an unexpected obstacle six months from now. If people look to leadership and say "so what do we do?" — you had buy-in. If they look at each other and say "given our principles, here's how we should adapt" — you have ownership.
The second scenario doesn't happen by accident. It's the product of a process that was designed to build strategic capacity, not just produce a document.
Ready to build a strategic planning process that creates real ownership? Schedule a free call to explore what that looks like for your organization.