How to create a strategic plan for your organization that won’t just sit on your bookshelf.

The process is the plan.

In the late 1990s, I was working for a university and participated in their strategic planning process. We spent the better part of a year engaging administrators, staff, faculty, and students in developing a beautifully comprehensive three ring binder of a 10-year strategic plan for the university. I proudly placed it on my mahogany bookshelf along with other important documents and continued on in my work.

Three years later, I pulled the binder off my bookshelf to check in on our progress, and not surprisingly, much of our plan was irrelevant because of changes in the higher education market, technology, economy, and culture. Our 10 year plan had been outmoded in under three years.

In my work helping leaders implement adaptive strategic planning in their organizations, I almost always encounter the statement: “We just need to finish the strategic plan.” I understand the sentiment, but it’s coming from a false belief that strategic planning can ever be completed. It can’t. A plan can’t be a plan if it’s outmoded shortly after it hits paper. Strategic plans are a process.

As soon as you have a strategic plan written down, the assumptions and hypotheses begin to unravel due to micro and macro internal and external changes. When you do your strategic plan, you start with a SWOT analysis, identifying internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats. While all of these change over time, it’s the last one that especially gets us. In a world of accelerating complexity, threats to our plans are born faster every day, so the only way to plan is to be in a constant process of planning — to practice planning so it is embedded in the way you think and act every day. This gives you the ability to adapt in real time to changes.

In our model, you practice planning in a quarterly session to push your 90 day plan forward another quarter so that you constantly have a 12–15 month plan. While the following month may still be 95% accurate, the 90 day plan is likely to be closer to 80% while the 15 month range is more like a guess. It’s not every year that we have a global pandemic, but change is accelerating, and changes in thousands of small variables have impact equal to one large one.

So what steps can you take?

Step 1: Implement a quarterly planning retreat into your organization’s rhythm. For smaller organizations, a half day or one day will suffice. As you grow, you’ll need more time. Prep your leadership team by asking them to provide a SWOT analysis.

Step 2: Hire a facilitator experienced in coaching and consulting organizations through key growth inflection points. Bring someone in who won’t just plug and play a template. They need to be able to adapt the plan and process to your unique context.

Step 3: Make sure your strategy is grounded in your organization’s identity. If you don’t have a solid set of identity statements, work on those before moving to strategy. Your identity statements should include a problem statement, dream/vision statement, org values and a mission statement with a 1–3 year time-framed mission goal. Your strategy is how you plan to achieve your mission goal, which should clearly communicate the most important measure of mission fulfillment for your organization to pursue in the horizon of your adaptive strategic plan.

Step 4: Identify a strategic goal that will measure your success at growing the core driver of your business model. This will likely be found at the intersection of your organization’s mission and revenue. For example, a high school may have a mission goal that measures the % of students accepted into college, and their strategic goal might then be the % of students involved in extracurricular activities and AP classes. With grounding in your mission goal and strategic goal, you’ll more clearly identify the goals and projects needed for the next 90 days.

Remember, the plan will start to lose its integrity immediately after finishing. This quarterly practice, however, will train you and your leaders to think adaptively. The process is the plan.