Setting Strategy in a Moment of Change

In the last couple of weeks, I have had almost identical conversations with the leaders of three different organizations. All of the organizations have strategic plans that expire at the end of this year, and the leaders were pondering what their strategic planning processes should look like next year. 

With each of the leaders, I shared my belief that the expiration of a strategic plan is one of the least compelling reasons to put time and effort into a strategy effort. The issue is not whether your plan is expired; it’s whether your strategy is expired. In other words, is the current strategy still relevant and working?

There are less time-consuming ways to address that question than launching a big strategy effort. For example, you can explore whether the strategy is relevant by asking key customers and external stakeholders for their advice. What risks and opportunities are you seeing in our environment? What’s interesting that we aren’t paying enough attention to? What could we be doing to serve you better? 

Their answers would signal whether the strategy is broadly right—and perhaps a large strategic planning effort is not required—or needs a larger rethink. If the latter, having already completed the most critical stakeholder conversations simply accelerates the eventual strategy process. 

Another approach is for leaders to engage their teams in strategic thinking. However, instead of doing that under the banner of “strategic planning,” asking for their perspectives in a regular team meeting can be fruitful. That might sound like, “As we think about where we want to focus in 2025, I thought it could be interesting to test where we have made the most and least progress on our existing plan.” Another version is, “If we were re-writing these goals based on what we see today, what would be different? Would we prioritize them differently?” 

Doing that exercise in a “regular” meeting and framing it as a “normal” activity decreases the stakes of the feedback. When you make “strategy” the headline, it’s almost like starting a conversation with “We need to talk….” It puts people on edge and signals there’s something to argue over.

What’s hanging over any strategy effort now is the higher level of uncertainty in the economy and government policy over the next year. That uncertainty is not necessarily a reason to avoid strategy, but it is a reason to avoid making sweeping conclusions about the near-term future as part of the process. 

Instead, a more productive process might focus first on identifying what’s unlikely to change in the long-term view. In the latest Harvard Business Review, professors Jianwen Liao and Feng Zhu write: “We have repeatedly found that in a highly volatile environment, firms anchoring their strategies in enduring factors, rather than transient ones, are more likely to achieve sustainable growth. We call this approach strategic constancy, and we believe that companies that practice it often turn out to be more resilient in times of adversity than companies that aggressively practice agility.”

And for the near term, the strategy effort can focus on building resilience and enhancing the ability to sense changes as they arise. Fortunately, the activities that would help organizations do so—listening closely to customers and stakeholders—are just the kind of always-on efforts that help them be successful in any strategy environment.