Strategic planning
Your strategic plan is outdated before it starts. Plan for change instead.
Traditional strategic plans assume a future that holds still. Here’s what planning looks like when it’s built for iteration, hypothesis testing, action, and learning, at the level of the organization and the individual.
Faced with uncertainty about the future, many leaders’ first instinct is to invest in the research and expertise that will produce a detailed strategic plan. The problem is that most of those plans are outdated before they begin.
The traditional approach asks for a deep investment of time and energy at every level. After months of planning, managers and staff spend real time and attention setting goals carefully, only to find them largely irrelevant by the end of the first quarter. It’s a demoralizing cycle. It erodes culture, dampens motivation, and casts change as an unwelcome disruption instead of a constant.
The organizations that succeed from here will be the ones that thrive in change. They’ll accept it as their reality and build their planning around it.
Why traditional plans fail in a changing world
Traditional goal setting and planning push leaders and teams to treat change as a crisis: an annoying force that keeps them from carrying out the plan. Worse, change and unexpected bumps become convenient excuses for avoiding the hard work of change itself. People will look for almost any reason to avoid shifting their behaviors and beliefs, so organizations have to help them through the cognitive, emotional, and technical challenge of staying focused on the core work, even when the core work is changing.
- Predicts the future in detailMakes clear choices and names the assumptions behind them
- Set once, defended for yearsReviewed and adjusted on a regular cycle
- Change is a disruption to the planChange is information for the next decision
- Goals go stale by the first quarterDirection holds while goals and tactics adapt
- Success measured by plan completionSuccess measured by progress and learning
The answer isn’t no plan
None of this means there’s no such thing as good strategy, or that you should stop planning. As more organizations shift from what Frederic Laloux calls “predict and control” to “sense and respond,” teams still need something to anchor and align around. This is not the place to replace something with nothing.
We’ve watched clients feel this tension again and again. So our strategic planning is built for it. You make clear choices about direction, impact, and resources. You treat the choices you can’t yet be sure of as hypotheses. And you build in the review points that let you act, learn from evidence, and adjust deliberately.
- Choose a directionClear choices about impact, priorities, and resources.
- Name the hypothesesWhat you believe will work, and what would tell you otherwise.
- ActPut the most important bets into motion with clear owners.
- Review the evidenceRegular check-ins on what’s working and what isn’t.
- AdjustKeep, change, or drop each bet, then start the next cycle.
Then the next cycle begins, with a sharper set of bets.
In practice, that can be as simple as this. A strategic assumption: a partnership model could expand reach without a proportionate increase in delivery costs. An action: test the model with a small number of partners. A review: look at quality, reach, costs, and partner readiness before deciding whether to expand. The direction stays steady while the path gets smarter.
Tracking progress without a complicated scorecard
A plan built for change needs a way to see progress that doesn’t require engineering a complicated set of metrics. Our Success and Sustainability Framework gives teams directional data points across five domains, so they can monitor progress and correct course. It’s a multi-measure view that can evolve over time, and we use it internally as well as with clients in for-profit and nonprofit settings. It’s common sense, and still comprehensive.
- ImpactFor those we serve today, are we achieving our intended impact?
- ReachAre we serving more people? Are we growing within our target markets?
- SatisfactionAre our stakeholders satisfied with their experience? Would they recommend us to others?
- Organizational health and performanceAre we building an effective team and a positive culture?
- Financial sustainabilityIs our financial position strong? Is it improving?
Together, these domains create a picture of progress through multiple lenses. Each can be filled in with as much or as little information as you have at the time, from a rigorous roll-up of data to a back-of-the-envelope view gathered from staff in real time. Reviewed at semi-annual retreats and interim progress checks, it becomes part of the organization’s infrastructure: a standing place to look at evidence and decide what to adjust.
Goals that can change when the work does
The same principle applies to individuals. If the organization itself is evolving quickly, how can managers and staff set six- or twelve-month goals that won’t change too? Expecting otherwise is a recipe for trouble. It creates a dynamic where the organization is trying to evolve while each person is motivated to keep doing what they were doing and stick to the plan.
The answer isn’t to abandon goal setting, or to throw up our hands and give up on accountability. It’s to build performance systems around ongoing dialogue and the skills every person needs in a dynamic environment.
Those skills start with the four domains of team performance: vision, process, relationships, and problem solving. On top of them sit the practices that matter most in uncertain times, like leaning into hard conversations, delegating well, and making decisions. Managers and their teams set direction and keep talking, course-correcting as the context changes. In a world of work where fewer and fewer roles have neat and tidy metrics, this approach works with reality rather than against it.
What this does for culture and performance
The biggest benefit of planning and performance systems built for change is their effect on culture. It is demoralizing for a team to have a strategy they know exists only on paper, or for people to set goals they know they’ll never reach. Responsive systems shift the focus to building trust and productive relationships, and to making key information transparent so people at every level can make better decisions.
They also help with low performance. By focusing on the practices that matter and the actions most within each person’s control, they make it much harder for anyone to hide behind change as an excuse.
Organizations that count on change and build it into their plans are far more likely to succeed than those still holding on to the plans of old. The goal was never a perfect plan. It was a direction you can act on, and a way to keep learning as you go.