Reflection 7 – Strategy and Planning

Millions or Billions, wasted or well spent?

Millions – if not billions – of rands and dollars are spent annually on strategic planning sessions. Whether all of this represents genuine value or significant waste is a question worth asking. Consultants would probably agree that a large proportion of strategic plans end up stored somewhere, forgotten – in a digital folder, in a filing cabinet, or, as one memorable example illustrates, wedged between folders at the back of a drawer where nobody remembered to look.

The story is not unusual. A company appointed consultants to write a five-year strategic plan on its behalf. Five years later, a different set of consultants arrived to develop an updated strategy and predictably asked to review previous plans. Management could not remember what had been planned or where the documents were. Someone eventually found the document, which had slipped between folders in the back of a filing cabinet. In the interim, the company had simply carried on with business as usual. After all, every company must have a strategy, and consultants write it. The consultant should just write up what the company is doing, right?

This raises an important question: if strategic planning frequently produces documents that disappear into storage, what is the actual point? And, more practically, what should strategic planning really involve?

The Problem with Strategic Planning

Multiple books are published annually on the how, what, and when of strategic planning and strategic management. Graduate and postgraduate research theses further expand on these. Many of these texts hold differing views on the need for, approaches to, and timing of strategic planning. Most seem to address what to consider during a planning session, but few identify the underlying thought processes involved.

The sheer number of tools, techniques, and models available compounds the situation. Without some structure, organisations risk analysis paralysis, superficiality, or simply continuing with business as usual while someone else writes the strategy.

This suggests the need to think differently about what strategic management is about – and what its underlying principles are.

Stripping It Back: The Core Questions

At its most basic, strategic management is simply the process of answering a few questions. The first two are foundational:

1. What is going on – what are we facing?
2. What are we going to do about it?

Any plan, however, requires implementation. This introduces the next two:

3. Who is going to do it and with what?
4. How will we make sure it happens?

Looking at these through the lens of management theory, question two is planning, question three is organising, and question four is controlling, with some degree of leading embedded throughout. Most problems with developing strategies seem to arise with answering the first question.

It is somewhat logical to conclude that if you do not understand your situation, you will not be able to identify the problems and issues you might face. This limited understanding underpins many problems in strategy and strategic management, and many strategic management tools and techniques have been developed specifically to address it.

There are also many suggested solutions to question two, but selecting the optimal one depends on having comprehensively and honestly answered question one.

Before any of these questions can be answered effectively, two prior questions should be addressed:

5. Why are we doing this now?
6. Where are we going – what do we want to achieve in the long term?

These two questions can, and often do, become integrated. This usually happens when the reason for doing something is considered narrowly rather than as part of a broader contextual understanding. They also involve time frames – and this is where clarity matters.

Time Frames and Future Orientation

Unlike projects, organisations generally do not have a pre-determined completion date. From an accounting perspective, there are annual financial statements, but accountants also assess an organisation’s financial viability going forward – known as going-concern assessments. It is therefore clear that strategy and strategic management cannot have only a here-and-now perspective. They require a distinct future orientation.

How far into the future should a strategic plan reach? The United Nations’ strategic planning guide suggests that “typical time horizons range from 3–5 years.”[i] FundingForGood.org states that “for many organizations, a 3–5-year strategic plan timeline balances ambition and vision with the ability to remain agile.”[ii] The United Nations Development Programme clarifies further, recommending planning “with the longest possible timeframe” while recognising that “constant changes within the environment require flexibility, whereas long-term planning reduces the precision of a plan. Thus, three to five years represents a good option.”[iii]

Three to five years is, in most industries, long enough to set meaningful direction and short enough to remain credible. It is, however, worth noting that the rate of change in many sectors is accelerating. This places an increasing premium on building strategic flexibility and adaptability.

For organisations operating in highly volatile or complex environments, the work of Henry Mintzberg and colleagues on the distinction between deliberate and emergent strategy is worth considering. Their concept of “strategy safari” highlights that no single strategic planning approach fits all contexts, and that strategy often emerges through practice rather than being fully designed in advance.[iv] In this light, the idea that every discussion is strategic begins to make sense.

The Purpose of an Organisation – Beyond Profit

A recurring challenge in strategic planning is the lack of clarity of purpose. Why does the organisation exist, and what is it trying to achieve beyond financial returns?

Peter Drucker – arguably one of the most influential management thinkers of the twentieth century – addressed this directly. He stated that “economic theory makes a fundamental assumption that maximising profits is the basic objective of every firm.”[v] He went further, arguing that “profit is not the explanation, cause of business behaviour and business decisions, but the test of their validity.”[vi] He expanded on this: “Profit is not a cause. It is the result – the result of the performance of the business in marketing, innovation and productivity.”[vii]

Reading Drucker more carefully, it becomes clear that innovation means finding ways of keeping customers by satisfying their changing needs. At the same time, marketing refers to ways of communicating to customers that the company can satisfy those needs and wants. Productivity refers to how company resources are applied to satisfy customer needs – and it is this that results in financial performance.

Drucker further argued that the purpose of a business is to create a customer, and that any business enterprise therefore has two – and only these two – basic functions: marketing and innovation.[viii] Irrespective of the funds available to an entrepreneur or the number of employees in a business, without customers whose needs the business addresses, there can be no profits (also see the reflection “From Hunting and Gathering to Strategic Management”). And if the customer does not know their needs can be satisfied, they will not support the organisation, and again, there will be no profits.

This perspective has significant implications for how strategy is framed. A strategy built solely around financial targets or shareholder returns risks missing the point. Strategy should begin with an honest understanding of the customer, the environment, and the organisation’s capacity to create value.

Understanding the Environment: The Challenge of Complexity

Answering the first question – what are we facing? – is where strategic planning most often struggles. When attempting to understand what is going on, one encounters two distinct dimensions: the uncontrollable external environment and the – hopefully – controllable internal environment. Without clear analysis, the uncontrollable part can easily be perceived as chaotic or overwhelming.

Strategic planning is usually done as a group, and achieving agreement or consensus requires that the answers be collectively understood. This often further complicates the discussion. Add the numerous tools and techniques available – their applicability, abbreviations, uses, and applications – and the process can begin to feel almost impossible.

The result can be what one might call strategic paralysis: organisations that either engage with the process superficially, outsource it entirely, or abandon it in favour of simply carrying on as they always have.

A key issue here is not the tools themselves but the capacity to think systematically about what is being observed. This requires a genuine commitment to questioning assumptions and understanding patterns – something that is easier to describe than to do (see also the reflection on “Models for Understanding”)

Strategic Thinking and the Scientific Method

The natural sciences are grounded in the scientific method – an inductive approach developed by Francis Bacon (1561–1626).[ix] This involves:

• Careful observation and collection of facts, observations, and evidence.
• Applying rigorous scepticism by reviewing both negative and affirmative instances.
• Creating a testable hypothesis through inductive reasoning and testing it through experiments and analysis.
• Adjusting or discarding the hypothesis based on the results.

Interestingly, the Deming cycle, Plan, Do, Check, Act – developed by Walter A. Shewhart (1891–1967) and later popularised by W. Edwards Deming – is rooted in the same scientific method.[x]

The objective of the scientific method is to obtain knowledge in the form of testable explanations that can be used to predict the results of future experiments. Strategic management and change management require something very similar – the ability to observe systematically, question assumptions, form and test hypotheses, and adapt as new information emerges.

A word of caution: Both strategy and change management frequently work with multiple variables, some apparently uncontrollable. It therefore becomes even more critical to apply systematic and disciplined thinking – to sit with the questions, resist premature closure, and search for underlying drivers and patterns.

The Importance of Existing Knowledge

The quality and currency of the information informing the process are also relevant in strategic management. Guidance from Southern New Hampshire University provides a useful rule of thumb for research sources: use material published within the past 10 years for the arts, humanities, and related disciplines, and within 2 to 3 years for faster-paced fields.[xi]

The focus on recent sources, however, can lead researchers and strategists to overlook the fundamental thinking underpinning a process – work that may have been published fifty or more years ago but remains foundational. In the more exact sciences, laws governing thermodynamics and other natural phenomena were developed decades or centuries ago and still hold true. This is not always the case in management disciplines, where “the latest” ideas are often built on others’ ideas without returning to the original thinking.

For the strategist, this means being cautious about uncritically adopting the latest model or framework without understanding its underlying assumptions. Understanding where ideas come from and the context in which they were developed is part of what enables good strategic judgment.

Where to From Here?

Strategic planning is not primarily a get-together-and-document-writing exercise. At its core, it is a process of thinking systematically and honestly about the environment, the organisation’s purpose, its capacity to create value, and the choices available to it. The strategic planning process requires an environment that enables the free flow of knowledge, ideas, and understanding from multiple perspectives, aimed at developing a common understanding among all team members.

The document that results from this thinking is, at best, a record of those choices and an instrument for communication and alignment.

The organisations that get the most value from strategic planning are generally those that treat it as an ongoing discipline rather than a periodic event. They are curious about their environment, honest about their limitations, deliberate in their choices, and adaptive in their implementation.

Future reflections in this series will explore the basic planning process, specific tools and techniques for environmental analysis, the relationship between strategy and organisational structure, and the role of culture in enabling or undermining strategic intent. For now, it is worth sitting with the questions – because the quality of the answers will always depend on the quality of the inquiry that precedes them.

One further dimension deserves mention: strategy is not only a rational exercise. Karl Weick’s research on sensemaking reminds us that organisations are social systems in which meaning is constructed, contested, and negotiated – not merely information-processing machines that optimise decisions. A strategic planning process that ignores this human and interpretive dimension is likely to produce documents that look coherent on paper but fail to shift behaviour on the ground.[xii]

References

[i]United Nations. (2012). United Nations System Strategic Planning Guide. UN Publishing. p. 14.

[ii]FundingForGood. (2023). Strategic Planning: A Practical Guide for Nonprofits. Retrieved April 2025, from https://www.fundingforgood.org/strategic-planning-guide/

[iii]United Nations Development Programme. (2009). UNDP Strategic Plan 2008–2011: Accelerating Global Progress on Human Development. UNDP. p. 8.

[iv]Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., & Lampel, J. (1998). Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management. Free Press.

[v]Drucker, P. F. (1954). The Practice of Management. Harper & Row. p. 37.

[vi]Drucker, P. F. (1973). Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. Harper & Row. p. 60. Note: The phrasing “profit is not the explanation, cause… but the test of their validity” appears in this later work; cf. Drucker, P. F. (1954). The Practice of Management. Harper & Row. p. 37.

[vii]Drucker, P. F. (1954). The Practice of Management. Harper & Row. p. 46.

8 Drucker, P. F. (1954). The Practice of Management. Harper & Row. p. 37.

9 [ix]Bacon, F. (1620). Novum Organum. London: Printed by Joannem Billium. (Translated by Joseph Devey, 1902)

10 [x]Deming, W. E. (1986). Out of the Crisis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering Study. Note: The PDCA/PDSA cycle is attributed to Walter A. Shewhart (1939) and popularised by Deming; see Shewhart, W. A. (1939). Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control. Graduate School, Department of Agriculture.

11 [xi]Southern New Hampshire University. (2023). How Old Should Sources Be in a Research Paper? Retrieved April 2025, from https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/education/how-old-should-sources-be

12 Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage Publications.

 

The author acknowledges the use of Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, for language editing and improving the readability of this text. Responsibility for the concept, research, content, and final blog remains with the author.