Your strategic plan probably isn’t a strategy
Almost every company we meet has been through a strategy process. Most of them came out of it with a document, not a strategy. Here is the process they all used, and the twenty-one places it quietly fails.
A useful test before you read any further. Take your organisation’s current strategic plan and find, in writing, one thing it has decided NOT to do. Not a risk it acknowledges. Not a priority it ranks lower. A door it has deliberately closed.
If you cannot find one, you do not have a strategy. You have a plan to work hard.
Operational excellence is not strategy
This is the distinction most strategy documents blur, and blurring it is the root of nearly everything that follows.
Doing things better and better. Adopting best practices. Everyone can do it, and eventually everyone does.
Doing things differently to deliver better value than the competition. It involves choices. It involves trade-offs.
Best practices, by definition, are what everyone else is already doing. A plan made entirely of them is a plan to converge on your competitors. You will get better. So will they. Nobody wins.
The process everybody uses
Whether it was run by a consultancy, a business school, or your own planning team, it almost certainly followed these six steps. There is nothing wrong with them. The problem is what happens inside them.
The twenty-one places it fails
These are drawn from strategy work with listed operators, state enterprises, and innovation-led SMEs. They are not exotic. You will recognise most of them, and that is exactly the point: the process fails in the same ways, in almost every organisation, because the failures are built into how it is run.
- Too vague, too generic. Not inspirational, not unifying, and far too long.
- No clear choice or trade-off in the values themselves.
- Jumping to solutions. Blindness by silos. Not admitting weaknesses.
- Ignoring trends, weak signals, and inspirational analogies — while being obsessed with the competition.
- Not placing customer and end-user insight at the centre.
- Only looking at existing markets. Ignoring inactive and unserved needs.
- Taking problems at face value, without understanding how they relate to one another.
- No clear choice or trade-off in where to play and how to win.
- Goals that are not SMART, that contain loopholes, or that are simply too many.
- Playing it safe, rather than pushing what is possible.
- Initiatives that are business as usual, dressed up as strategic.
- All the effort goes into quick wins, and almost none into R&D.
- Focusing on protecting, rather than on creating.
- Afraid to take calculated bets on the trends that matter.
- Not being data-driven when sizing the financial opportunity — or the cost.
- The organisational structure was never prepared to support the level of adaptability required.
- Performance is defined as not failing. Experimentation is not allowed.
- KPIs too rigid, that do not add up, and are not linked from top to bottom.
- Failing to account for dependencies.
- The review rhythm is not aligned with the pace of change.
- Everyone is too immersed in day-to-day operations to take the time to re-strategise.
Common flaws in traditional strategy development. Credit: Choedpong Khannabha.
The pattern underneath
Read the twenty-one together and one theme runs through almost all of them: the process avoids choosing. It gathers, it analyses, it aligns, it cascades — and at no point does it force anyone to close a door. SWOT does not make you choose. A balanced scorecard does not make you choose. A vision statement written to offend nobody does not make you choose.
The second theme is that the customer is missing. In a six-step process that can run for months, it is entirely possible that nobody speaks to a single customer. The market gets represented by a slide of competitor logos and a market-size figure someone found.
A strategy that contains no choice and no customer is not a strategy. It is an aspiration with a budget attached.
Where to start
You do not need to throw the six steps away. They are a reasonable skeleton. What they need is something that forces the two things they cannot force on their own — a real choice, and a real customer.
Three questions, before your next planning cycle begins:
- What are we deciding NOT to do — and is it written down where everyone can see it?
- How many customers did we actually speak to before we wrote this?
- If every initiative in this plan succeeds, will we be meaningfully different from our competitors — or just better at the same things?
If the third answer is “better at the same things”, you have a plan for operational excellence. That is a perfectly good thing to have. It is just not the thing you thought you were buying.
We run strategy development as a design problem, not a planning exercise — because the hard part was never the analysis. It was the choosing.
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