Strategic Planning

It took a global pandemic for many leaders to abandon annual strategic plans and fixed budgets. Few companies want to return to those old ways of working, but most are struggling to find a better approach.

When it comes to effective strategic planning, four pitfalls typically impede progress:

• Time and timing. Companies devote time, resources, and leadership attention to the wrong issues, with discussions centered on opinions rather than data-driven analysis and with little to no debate about real alternatives.
• Settling for underperformance. Leadership teams resist addressing true full potential in case it becomes a target, and/or strategic decisions are translated into financial/operational plans and sandbagged.
• A road to nowhere. Strategy discussions don’t lead to meaningful decisions and often result in unrealistic targets that no one is accountable for or committed to.
• Focusing on the past. Performance reviews concentrate on the past instead of discussing leading indicators and the critical issues that will affect future performance.

Living Strategy avoids these pitfalls by translating your ambition and multiyear outlook into two distinct planning and execution approaches: a delivery agenda that addresses what's relatively well known and predictable, and a development agenda that is dynamic and designed to address uncertainty. Combined, these agendas ensure that you spend time and energy on the right issues, set a suitably high ambition, decide and commit effectively, and stay focused on the future, not the past. Now you can accelerate delivery, adapt quickly, and dynamically allocate resources. Living Strategy can help you set a new level of ambition, reach it quickly, and continually improve so you maintain a winning edge.