Why Traditional Planning Is Failing Your Organisation
From Strategy Cascade to Strategy Conversation
Your board wants clarity. Your team hungers for clear direction. Yet in today's environment, the landscape keeps shifting beneath your feet. If you're finding that traditional strategic planning approaches aren't delivering the engagement and results you need, you're not alone.
The Hidden Cost of Traditional Strategy
Many leaders tell me they're caught in an exhausting cycle: carefully orchestrated workshops, meticulously crafted objectives, and comprehensive strategy documents that somehow fail to translate into meaningful change. Despite investing significant time and resources, their strategic planning often feels more like a performance than a transformation.
The real cost isn't just in time and resources spent. It's in the untapped potential locked away in your organisation, such as the frontline insights never surfaced, the breakthrough ideas that don't emerge because conventional hierarchies keep them buried, and the collaborative energy lost to passive engagement.
Reimagining Strategy as a Living Ecosystem
Instead of viewing strategy as a document to be cascaded down through your organization, what if we approached it as a living ecosystem that needs to be cultivated? Just like a thriving garden, successful strategy requires:
Skilled gardeners: Employees who possess intimate knowledge of their areas and can spot early signs of both problems and opportunities
Diverse plants: Your customers, whose needs must be understood and nurtured with the right conditions
Expert pollinators: Industry specialists and thought leaders who cross-pollinate ideas and bring fresh perspectives
Rich soil: Strong partnerships and foundational relationships in the external environment that provide essential nutrients for growth
Making Strategy Everyone's Business
The shift from traditional planning to open strategy isn't about abandoning structure or control. It's about creating the right conditions for strategic thinking to flourish at every level. Here's how:
Start with genuine curiosity rather than predetermined outcomes
Create spaces for diverse voices to contribute meaningfully, not just validate existing ideas
Build feedback loops that allow your strategy to evolve as circumstances change
Focus on capability building through strategic dialogue rather than just plan creation
The Power of Strategic Dialogue
When you move from strategy cascade to strategy conversation, something remarkable happens. Instead of diluting your strategic intent through layers of translation, you amplify it through diverse perspectives and fresh thinking.
Your team becomes not just receivers of strategy but active creators and champions of your strategic direction.
Taking the First Step
The path to more engaging and effective strategy doesn't require throwing out everything about the traditional approach. There are elements of the traditional approach to strategy that still serve our organisations. For a start, the transparency of formal documentation entails accountability for our commitments, and the funds that will be set aside to achieve them.
But there is value in making some shifts towards contemporary approaches in opening up strategy. It starts with being willing to question traditional engagement and experiment with new ways of involving your stakeholders.
Are you ready to transform your strategic planning from a periodic exercise into a living, breathing part of your organization? The future of strategy is open, adaptive, and collaborative – and it begins with a conversation.
Is your organisation struggling to move beyond traditional strategic planning? Let's explore how an open strategy approach could help your team thrive. Book a call to start the conversation.
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