Regardless of the industry, every company needs a strong strategy to achieve its goals. Yet crafting a successful strategy is often easier said than done — especially when it fails to receive the attention and effort it deserves.
According to Harvard Business Review research, 85% of executive leadership teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy, and half spend no time at all. Most employees do not understand their company’s strategy. It comes as no surprise that up to 90% of organizations ultimately fail to achieve their strategic goals.
What Is Strategic Planning?
Strategic planning is an ongoing organizational process that uses available knowledge to document a company’s intended direction. It prioritizes efforts, allocates resources effectively, aligns stakeholders and employees around shared goals, and ensures those goals are grounded in data and sound reasoning.
Three Key Benefits of Strategic Planning
1. Creates a Forward-Looking Vision
Strategic planning creates a single, forward-looking vision that aligns employees and stakeholders, allowing everyone to act in service of the broader strategy.
2. Surfaces Biases and Reasoning Errors
Strategic planning forces managers to justify decisions using data — counteracting cognitive biases like Recency Effect, Occam’s Razor Bias, Inertia Bias, and Confirmation Bias.
3. Tracks Progress Against Strategic Goals
A strategic plan establishes organization-level KPIs that cascade down to business units, departments, teams, and individuals.
Four Characteristics of Powerful Strategic Goals
1. Purpose-Driven
Professor Rebecca Henderson argues that purpose-driven leadership improves business performance and helps organizations outperform competitors.
2. Long-Term Orientation
Strategic goals reflect long-term vision and must not be confused with operational targets — the daily milestones that move you toward them.
3. Actionability
Strong strategic goals are actionable. Ask whether your team can take concrete steps toward achieving them.
4. Measurability
Transform vague ambitions into specific, trackable targets — e.g., “increase brand recognition by 80% by 2030.”
How to Prioritize Strategic Goals
1. Calculate Expected ROI
ROI = (Net Profit / Investment Cost) × 100. Comparing expected returns helps identify which goals best serve your organization’s interests.
2. Consider Current Events
Major events — policy shifts, economic disruptions, technological breakthroughs — affect the timeliness of strategic priorities. The most urgent goals rise to the top of the priority list.
