What is wrong with Strategic Planning?

While reading Blue Oceans Strategies I was finally able to understand what was that bothering concern that I have after participating in several Strategic Planning activities. My naive expectation about Strategic Planning was a "creative" exercise where growth alternatives are considered with a long term perspective and critical & meaningful changes are evaluated. However, the more I am involved the more I realize that the whole exercise has become a mere justification of what has been done and keeping business with minimum change of direction.
The main consequence of this situation is creating the following issues:
- Companies do not drive real innovation in their businesses
- Financial performance is market average at best. If you do not do solid innovation you cannot leap the market for too long, the power of mean will drag you down after being on the top
- As people stay in the companies their brains stop thinking "outside" the box and becomes more effective on "telling" the story as every body wants to here it

Industrial companies organizations have a significant amount of engineers in their structures so the company organization is a blend of engineer's ADN. Engineering education in most countries is developed around finding an effective ways of performing a task or designing a widget. You may say that successful engineers are those that can understand how a "system" works, can improve it and can make it work efficiently. When this methodology is applied to a strategic planning effort, "engineers" (now executives) will be driven to apply the same methodology, find what it works, make it more efficient and make it happen.
While this may be effective for a short term strategy, when trying to improve long term perfomance you loose the diversity of new opportunities. This is increased when 80% of the effort is focusing on the "planning" piece of the "strategic planning" process.
Planning is where engineers are comfortable:

• it is about numbers that justify a result
• risk of failure is quantified as a probability of success and net present value.