Ineffectiveness is the fact or quality of not achieving what something is meant to achieve. It names the failure, not the thing itself: the ineffectiveness of a policy, a drug, a campaign, or a way of teaching. This is a formal noun, at home in essays, news, and reports. People use it when they want to talk about the problem as a whole, often to complain or to explain why a change is needed. It does not mean 'being slow' or 'wasting money' — that is inefficiency — though a plan can of course be both. Though actually, writers sometimes pile this word on when they simply mean 'it did not work', which is the same idea in a heavier coat.