A plan is not strategy. So stop thinking it is.

When we do strategy work, there’s one piece of feedback we sometimes receive, and it’s entirely predictable. You might wonder why we don’t do something about the bit of our work that’s broken, if we know we’re going to get the feedback. But here’s the thing: the feedback isn’t about our work. It’s about the gap between strategy and the work of lifting one’s finger to put it into action:

“The thinking is creative and high level and gets us focussed, but it’s not the plan we need to put it into action,”?someone might say.

Much of our strategy work builds on that of Rotman Professor Roger Martin , and his five interconnecting elements of strong strategy. We create a clear idea of

• what people want
• the big idea (or two) that’s going to take them there
• how they’re going to do it
• the existing superpowers they can harness from their community (or the capabilities in which they need to invest)
• the foundational and signature systems that will support this work for the long haul.

And you’re right - this isn’t a plan. This is strategy.

So do we neglect planning in strategic planning? Of course not.

Planning can take all sorts of forms, and most organisations should have some kind of method of planning already. We don’t always need to invent new ways. But the feedback on that implementation gets gnarly when none of these planning methods is in place throughout the whole organisation:

There’s the annual development plan, where everyone creates a departmental plan to solve their own problems. If you’re lucky, people pull together. But most often you have so many departmental plans vying with their own needs that the cost of coordination is too high.

There’s the five year plan, where everyone knows the goals for the years ahead, and the checklist of jobs to be done on the way. If you’re lucky you get two years out of it before it feels irrelevant or simply ‘done’. If you’re really unlucky the Board will change the goalposts when nobody’s looking (this is what happens when new Board members join the party).

You can do sprints.?In a series of sprints, where teams know the big idea and the goals they should hit at some point, but have more freedom on how they go about doing it and they work towards a smaller outcome in a shorter period of time. The teams aren’t necessarily departmental, because what they’re working on is for the good of the school, not just their team.

Clearly, it’s the last one that we support schools to implement. Agile sprints, semester pushes, termly goals… you can call it what you want. But little and often, with early successes (and failures you can actually learn from before it’s too late),?that?is planning that works.

But working out how you’re going to plan, or put an idea into action, is not the same as defining your strategy. And if all you have is agility, without that singular, focussed strategy, you’ve got an organisation full of people running fast in any direction they please.

As Roger Martin puts it :

“If you plan, it's an absolute guarantee of losing. Planning is comforting. It involves budgeting for things that need done, accounting and controlling the costs of doing them. It's all controllable by you, so it's comforting.

“Strategic planning isn't strategy, most of the time. It's a collection of tasks to be done. Strategy isn't the same as planning. Strategy is about defining the outcome, showing what you believe will happen. It can't be proven in advance.

“And you have no control over whether your community will achieve the outcome.

“And that's why doing real strategy creates some angst, too: it might not work. So how do you give yourself less angst by creating a little more certainty? Well, strategy is an integrated set of choices, that depend on each other, that put forward the theory of why you're making one choice over the other. It shows how and why you think you'll achieve the outcome you're seeking. And it helps you define the outcome in the first place.

“It's slow thinking, it's logical. And it gives you time to tweak and refine over time.”

Here’s to slow thinking. Here’s to strategy. Here’s to knowing what you want.

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