Use Strategic Planning to Set a Clear Direction for Enterprise Success

While the unit of analysis may differ, the core tenets of strategic planning discussed here apply across all these levels in the enterprise.

The three types of strategic plans are:

• Strategic

• Operational

• Contingency 

Build a successful enterprise strategic plan in three key steps 

A good strategic plan follows a consistent and sequential process. 

1. Ensure consistent use of terms to minimize confusion and set a baseline for collaboration.

2. Build a strong foundation for more detailed planning by setting or pressure-testing mission, vision and goal statements upfront.

3. Streamline stakeholder input by limiting mission, vision and goal setting to senior leadership, and leaving objective, action plan, and measure and metric development to managers with executional expertise.

Minimize confusion in strategic planning by defining and aligning on key terms 

Most strategic plans are too vague, noncommittal or unwieldy to be truly effective. Set a baseline for collaboration with major stakeholders to create a shared understanding of the key components of strategic planning:

• Mission and vision. Mission and vision are often confused with one another, but they serve different functions. A mission statement is clear, inspiring and value-oriented. It defines an organization’s reason for being (i.e., “Who are we?”) and articulates a unique, enduring, long-term ambition. A vision statement describes what an organization is working toward (i.e., “Where are we going?”) and embodies the organization’s abstract but realistic future aspirations. 

• Goals and objectives. Goals and objectives are often conflated but serve distinct purposes. Goal statements are value-aligned and outcome-oriented — they articulate what the organization aims to achieve. Objectives provide an important roadmap with measurable steps for how the organization will achieve its goals.

• Action plans formally document the steps required to meet an objective. They are the primary source of information for how an objective will be executed, sequenced, monitored, controlled and closed.

• Measures and metrics are often treated as interchangeable, but they are not exactly the same. A measure is the name of an observable business outcome (for example, employee engagement), while a metric describes the actual data collected to quantify the measure (for example, percentage of “satisfied” employees in an annual survey).

Different stakeholders are required for the different elements of planning: Mission, vision and goals are best set by senior leadership, while objectives, action plans, measures and metrics are best left to managers with execution expertise.

Boost agility by improving business partner engagement in strategic planning 

Market disruptions increasingly invalidate plans, yet only 29% of strategists agree their organizations change plans fast enough to respond to disruption.

Gartner has worked with clients to evaluate hundreds of strategic plans across industries, geographies and strategic contexts. The best plans are driven by information and data surfaced through diagnostics and when final, templatized for easy understanding and sharing.

Bring clarity, structure and actionable insight into your strategic plan by incorporating the following activities into your strategic planning process:

1. Lookback. Organizations that fail to learn from their experience struggle to meaningfully improve their strategic performance. Use performance dashboards to understand the root causes of your successes and failures as an organization and extract and present lessons or imperatives to improve future performance.
2. Internal scan. Companies that don’t assess core capabilities regularly tend to under- or overestimate their ability to deploy successful strategies. Use tools like Gartner Score to:
   • Review your organization’s capability strengths and gaps
   • Understand which capabilities must be built to develop a competitive advantage
   • Close any capability gaps and inform future growth bets
3. External scan. Without identifying early signs of threats and opportunities, strategic plans lack impact and expose the organization to the risk of gradually losing its relevance. Use tools like Gartner “Tapestry of Trends” (TPESTRE) to:
   • Review market dynamics and factors that govern the attractiveness of the market
   • Understand trends among competitors and customers
   • Identify and act on market opportunities and threats
4. Vision. Without a clear vision, strategic goals are imprecise, creating internal conflicts and strategy stalls. Templatize your mission and vision statements to:
   • Articulate an ambitious yet achievable vision statement that motivates employees and facilitates goal development
   • Present a comprehensive view of the end state envisioned for your organization
   • Identify strategic imperatives that must be realized to achieve the desired vision

5. Goals. When goals are unclear, the strategy can be derailed by conflicting actions, confusion and misalignment. Use tools such as business-alignment conversation guides to:
   • Develop high-quality goals that will allow you to act on your imperatives
   • Ensure goals are aligned with the vision, external environment and internal function
   • Develop actionable roadmaps to enable effective execution
6. Initiatives. Poorly articulated initiatives can lead the organization to overinvest in ill-advised ventures or underinvest in prudent ones. Use tools such as decision-maker and portfolio scorecards to:
   • Make an action plan for the organization to succeed in chosen markets
   • Prioritize the key strategic initiatives to achieve the organization’s objectives and goals
   • Identify and close capacity constraints that can hinder the smooth execution of the strategy
7. Measures. If measures do not directly support strategic goals, managers will make poor decisions during execution that will derail the strategy. Use tools to evaluate, select and track the right metrics to:
   • Improve the rigor and credibility of your metrics
   • Assign accountability for key actions and behaviors
   • Ensure capacity for course correction and timely execution
8. Messaging. If the stated strategy does not engage and inspire the team, it is not the right strategy. Templatize your messaging to:
   • Build a clear communication plan that motivates stakeholders to execute the strategy
   • Ensure the information presented in your strategic plan documents is easily digestible