Recently, I’ve been asked to help leaders with strategy — only to find that most of their focus was on operational plans. The real work, is helping leaders continously look up and out — to widen perspective and shift their focus from the business to stakeholders.
A strategy captures thinking around challenges and opportunities. — what’s needed, what you’re pursuing, why it’s important, and what it enables for stakeholders. A strategic plan provides detailed actions and implementation paths to achieve the strategy.
They each serve entirely different purposes.
We see a lot of plans that leave out the underlying thinking and rationale for the decisions embedded in the strategy. It makes it much harder to share engage other authentically and much harder for people to actually determine what actions are needed. They have to follow the plan.
A strategy must be implementable — it doesn’t exist without action. But it’s one thing to explain the strategy and actions that accompany it. It is something else to explain the detailed plans required.
A good strategy document has an explanation — a basis for developing more detailed plans and programs of change — and its thinking.