A client recently asked me, “What’s happened to strategic planning? I don’t hear much about it these days.” I answered that it’s not done the way it used to be and that many organizations now seem to consider medium-to-long-term, holistic planning a luxury that’s hard to justify given the press of chaotic markets, insurgent competitors, fickle customers, and distracted, harried stakeholders.

Even market leading and strategy savvy companies are shortcutting analytical processes once considered essential management disciplines. Instead, many spend time responding to market exigencies and, then, post hoc, packaging these accumulated responses as “strategies”.

That’s understandable. To the average CEO responding to 50 emails a day, processes like structured or hypothesis-based problem solving and scenario planning seem antiquated—cumbersome at best and distracting at worst.

So when planning does happen today, what does it look like?

• The CEO tasks her staff with doing some interviews with senior leadership and, maybe, some customers, and then hosts a retreat among stakeholders in a hotel conference room over a long weekend, the proceedings from which become a strategy.
• The annual budgeting process serves as a proxy for strategy setting, where the accumulated budget narratives that emerge from around the organization become the de facto enterprise strategy.
• The company buys prepackaged analyses or hires a consultant to run a model, simulation, or survey in functional areas like HR, Marketing, or IT and then tasks staff with assessing implications and recommending actions.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these approaches. But they’re fragmented efforts that won’t be enough in the long run. You’ll miss important risks and opportunities and the white space in-between without deeper, structured, ongoing reflection about what’s really needed across the enterprise. You’ll also miss the opportunity to build awareness of the company’s strategic context among staff and acceptance of what needs to be done among leadership.

Here are the first three of six ways you can embed efficient, systematic reflection and impactful action into your organization’s decision-making processes.

1. Create sacrosanct space for reflection and deliberation. Budget enough time every 3-4 weeks for your leadership team to consider the important but not urgent things happening in your organization. Stick to this calendar commitment and focus. This is the hardest part but produces the greatest gains in building your strategic muscle.
   • For reflection sessions, set expectations that you plan to engage in a time-limited but deliberative process for finding a range of possible solutions to your potential problems or exploiting nascent opportunities.
   • Start by getting the questions right. The answers will come, but not if you’ve framed the issues too narrowly or incorrectly.
   • Focus on issues that arise organically from consideration of current products, markets, and operations and prioritize among these. Jettison any that aren’t the very best use of senior time and push whatever decisions you can as far down as you can.
   • Know what you’re dealing with. If you’re truly being disrupted in a core market, then a more formal, concerted effort may still be needed. But this is more reinvention than planning and requires dedicated resources working at speed and reporting to the CEO. It also means involving a broader group of stakeholders (including trustees, customers, and channel partners) ideally augmented by outside resources that can provide unassailable data and an objective check on external reality. With a more continuous, embedded planning discipline, these crisis situations should be relatively rare.
2. Set realistic planning horizons. Take a 12-18-month view of emerging issues. Anything longer won’t capture and hold the organization’s attention, and there’s too much uncertainty out there to think longer term with any assurance. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still understand the longer term financial and operational implications of your situation. But this awareness can exist in the background, while your energy and attention focus on the foreground understanding of what’s happening now and what needs to be done about it immediately. An added benefit to shorter planning windows: you can create metrics and incentives within the annual planning cycle that will more readily motivate new behaviors among those responsible for analyzing and proposing new strategies.
3. Vest responsibility for championing change with functional leaders and stagger critical analyses throughout the year. For example, task your Chief Marketing Officer with developing a case for changing how you generate demand—tackling a new market, introducing new products, working with new channel partners, etc. This should include a pro forma analysis that examines all aspects of the opportunity/problem—strategic, operational, organizational, reputational, financial, and political—and takes anywhere from 90-120 days but not longer. Yes, this is an aggressive timeframe. But the analysis doesn’t have to be perfect. Shoot for roughly right. If strategic expertise is limited, bring in outside support to help with specific analyses. This isn’t about boiling the ocean but providing targeted guidance on a specific strategic opportunity or problem. Several of these analyses can be running in parallel.

Ongoing, purposeful consideration and accumulation of focused analyses create a robust strategic context for the organization—the same as you’d achieve with a periodic, formal strategic planning effort and done in ways that are more relevant and responsive to shifting conditions.

In a future article, we’ll look at three more ways to make this happen.