Chris Kobylecki
It's funny that we call it "strategic planning," and in our heads, it's all about the plans we create. But what planning actually is, is a process of alignment among a team. The plan itself? Often less important than you might think.
As Dwight Eisenhower wisely noted, "Planning is essential, but plans are useless." This isn't contradictory—it's the essence of strategic thinking.
We call it "strategic planning" yet fixate on the plans themselves. After years spent in planning sessions, I've come to realize the truth: the real magic isn't in the documents we produce, but in the conversations we have along the way. You can forget about commitment or accountability without voicing everyone's concerns at the planning stage. Yet too often in those meetings, one person just tries to convince others they are right about what to do.
Don't we all know SMART goals by now? We do, yet we often forget about checking if everyone understands them the same way. It's always revealing to see how many definitions of a "Lead" we have among a team.
Another layer of thinking about goals is shifting from Output (work I do) to Outcome (results I achieve). This one is tricky because approaching things from the change I want to implement or the results I want to have becomes a mind shift—not easy to implement if all we've been doing is focusing on outputs.
Another challenge is that we don't only set plans but we need to allocate time to work on them and time to align on how we're progressing. Many teams try to implement OKRs. They meet, they set them, but forget that it's about the ongoing conversation: "Are we on the right course or not?" This often ends with the conclusion: "OKRs don't work for us."
