Is Your Strategy Too Simplistic?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Organizational Project Management   Strategy  

Even though your 2025 plans are already in place, it’s always a good time to be thinking about strategies for the year, and trends that may be happening.

I thought I would ask my old friend Google what was already out there on the subject, and on the first page I found something that promised to advise how leaders can improve their 2025 planning. It was published in late November, so that might have been a clue that it was a bit late, but I thought I would give it a read. Well, according to that article, to improve strategic planning leaders must do three things:

• Identify what they are trying to achieve
• Decide what they will measure
• Determine how they will deliver

Now, I’m not going to claim to be the world’s foremost expert on corporate strategy, but is that really going to improve strategic planning? I mean, without those three things, do you even have strategic planning?

It would be easy to discount the article as misguided or misaligned, but I’m not so sure that’s the case. I genuinely believe that, for a lot of organizations, strategic planning is so broken—or perhaps more accurately, so absent that this guidance is actually going to help them.

And that got me thinking: Is strategic planning so straightforward that you either “get it” or you don’t? And there’s no mechanism for the more …

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