What Is Strategic Planning?

Strategic Planning is an annual process organizations conduct to plan their near-, mid-, and long-term strategies. A robust Strategic Planning process arms the organization with clearly defined strategic objectives across all time horizons and prepares the organization for successful Strategy Development and Execution.

Per Wikipedia, we can define Strategic Planning as:

Strategic Planning is a crucial process, but often poorly executed, leading to poor translation from Strategy to Execution. In most organizations, executives complain that their Strategic Planning is overly bureaucratic, insufficiently insightful, and doesn’t accommodate today's rapidly changing, digital markets.

To combat these issues, we can follow these 3 steps of Strategic Planning:

1. Explore Strategy across 3 time horizons.
2. Encourage productive and stimulating Strategic Dialogue.
3. Engage a broad, decentralized group of stakeholders.