The hidden risk in corporate Nigeria’s 2027 planning season

Why annual planning can renew business targets without fixing the organisational problems that prevented companies from achieving them

Across corporate Nigeria, another annual planning season is approaching.

Budgets will be reviewed, revenue projections revised and strategy teams tasked with preparing new plans. Executive committees will debate priorities, while leadership teams retreat to hotels and conference rooms to decide what 2027 should look like for their organisations.

There are reasons for optimism.

PwC’s 2026 Nigerian CEO Survey found that 91 per cent of chief executives expected the economy to improve, while 56 per cent were very or extremely confident about their companies’ revenue growth prospects. Nearly half also said their organisations had entered new sectors in the previous five years.

However, one finding deserves particular attention as companies prepare for another planning cycle. Half of Nigerian CEOs expressed concern about whether their businesses were transforming quickly enough to keep pace with technological changes. Only a quarter said their organisations were rapidly testing new ideas with customers or end users.

In other words, ambition is not necessarily the problem. The bigger challenge may be what happens when those ambitions meet the realities of the organisation.

This raises an important question as companies prepare for the new year: Before setting targets for 2027, have they properly understood why some of their 2026 objectives were not achieved?

Most companies would argue that they already examine their performance.

They conduct annual reviews, analyse budget variances and assess why revenue targets were missed, projects delayed, costs increased or growth exceeded expectations. Lessons are documented, and recommendations are made.

But reviewing performance is not the same as reviewing execution.

A performance review asks: What happened?

An execution review goes further: What about the way the organisation operates contributed to that result?

Consider a familiar year-end scenario.

A strategic project is six months behind schedule. The project team blames procurement delays. Procurement points to repeated changes in specifications. Engineering says operational requirements were not agreed upon early enough. Operations argues that changing market conditions required flexibility, while Finance explains that rising costs made it necessary to scrutinise some expenditure.

Every explanation may be valid.

The problem is ending the discussion with five explanations but no clear diagnosis.

If the same departments return in January with unchanged decision-making structures, incentives, responsibilities and escalation procedures, simply adjusting the project target may not improve the outcome.

Akin Monehin, Managing Partner of Praxis Execution Advisory and a former Shell transformation executive, believes this is where many corporate planning processes fall short.

“A company can understand why it missed the number without understanding why the organisation produced the miss,” he said.

The distinction is important because annual planning naturally focuses management attention on the future.

What are the growth targets? Which markets should the company enter? How much capital should be committed? Where can costs be reduced? What technology should be introduced?

These are necessary questions. However, they can also distract leadership from examining the organisational problems that affected performance in the previous year.

For instance, a project that repeatedly lost funding may receive another budget allocation without examining how capital was reprioritised during the year.

A cross-departmental initiative that stalled may be assigned a new sponsor without addressing whether anyone was genuinely responsible for delivering the overall outcome.

Similarly, a transformation programme that achieved its milestones but failed to deliver the expected financial benefits may simply be extended because management considers it to be on track.

The targets change, but the underlying problems remain.

This challenge is not limited to Nigerian businesses. Recent research on strategy execution continues to highlight the gap between developing a strategy and getting an organisation to deliver it.

A 2026 Harvard Business Review article noted that companies often invest heavily in designing strategies but pay less attention to the work required to translate those decisions into sustained execution.

McKinsey & Company has made a similar argument in its research on operating models, noting that even high-performing companies can fail to realise much of their strategic potential when their organisational structures are not properly aligned with their objectives.

For companies preparing their 2027 plans, the message is clear.

A strategy retreat should not become an exercise in revisiting every failure from the previous year or assigning blame to different departments.

Instead, management should focus on identifying the recurring organisational problems that need to change for the next strategy to succeed.

Monehin offers a practical example.

Suppose three of a company’s five most important initiatives required the chief executive’s intervention during the year before critical decisions involving different departments could be made.

The CEO might consider this evidence of effective leadership, and perhaps it was.

However, management should also ask why those decisions could not be resolved before reaching the chief executive.

Were responsibilities unclear? Were departmental incentives working against one another? Was there no executive accountable for the overall outcome? Or did management meetings repeatedly discuss disagreements without resolving them?

“If the answer is that the CEO had to intervene because these were genuinely CEO-level decisions, fine,” Monehin said.

“But if ordinary enterprise trade-offs move only when the CEO enters the room, I would want to understand that before giving the organisation a more ambitious strategy next year.”

The same principle applies to management meetings.

McKinsey’s research on integrated business planning found that in roughly two-thirds of the organisations assessed, planning meetings functioned more as periodic business reviews than as continuous decision-making processes capable of keeping strategy, operations and resources aligned.

The difference may appear subtle, but its consequences can be significant.

A management team can become well informed about a problem without doing anything to resolve it.

An issue may appear on the agenda in May, June and July. Each meeting produces better presentations, more detailed explanations and another action tracker, yet the underlying problem remains unresolved.

The question for year-end reviews, therefore, should not simply be whether a company has enough management structures and procedures in place.

It should be whether those structures are helping the organisation make decisions and deliver results.

Nigeria’s improving macroeconomic environment makes this conversation even more relevant.

PwC’s latest second-half economic outlook points to improved exchange-rate stability, stronger foreign reserves and economic growth, while noting that structural challenges continue to limit the extent to which businesses can translate these improvements into higher productivity and investment.

For companies, a more predictable economic environment could create opportunities to make bigger investments and pursue new growth strategies.

However, greater opportunities do not automatically translate into an organisation’s ability to take advantage of them.

This is why one of the most important parts of the 2027 planning process may need to happen before management presents its new strategy.

Companies should ask themselves:

• Which important business objectives repeatedly fell short during the year?
• What did management initially believe was responsible?
• What does the available evidence now reveal?
• Which leadership behaviours, decision-making processes, incentives or departmental relationships contributed to the problems?
• What will actually change when the new business year begins?

For Monehin, the risk is straightforward.

“The danger in annual planning is not just repeating last year’s targets. It is carrying forward the operating conditions that defeated them.”

A new year gives companies an opportunity to set fresh ambitions and pursue new opportunities. It should also be an opportunity to address the problems that held them back.

If the same decision-making patterns, unresolved disagreements and management habits remain unchanged in January, much of the new strategy may be little more than a fresh presentation of old problems.