A Strategy Without a Plan Is a Dream, and a Plan Without a Strategy Is a Journey To Nowhere.
Strategy and Planning get mixed around all the time. They are both critical, yet are very different in respect to why, how, and what you do and what they intend to accomplish. Strategy is about making consequential choices and navigating the path to deliver unique value. While planning is organizing tasks, budgets, schedule, and people into coordinated execution to reach the goal.
If we think about taking a road trip, strategy would be choosing the destination, determining who would be traveling with you, what experience you want to have, and why you want to take this trip. For example maybe it’s a bucket-list trip with lifelong friends from San Francisco to New York to leisurely experience the unique landscapes, national parks, local cuisine and culture of the country. Now that you have a strategy defined, planning would be figuring out the best time to go and how many days it will take, what to budget for the trip, what locations you will go to and in what order, the resources needed like a packing list, vehicle and lodging plan. Yet if the strategy were to visit the 10 largest cities between San Francisco and New York in a week, then the plan would need to change accordingly – different schedule, resources, budget, and venues.
Similarly in business, strategy needs to come first. Making difficult choices to establish clear direction that will deliver unique experience and value. Then planning is the engine that mobilizes the choices with coordinated execution that turns the dream into reality.
Think of Strategy as a Verb and Planning as an Integrated Process
Framing strategy as a verb highlights the nature of it being in motion, the act of navigating a series of integrated choices that move you forward to a hoped for future. Deciding what game you will play, customers and markets to serve, value and products or services to deliver, business model to use, what assets will create an advantage, what challenges or competition will be encountered, and what winning looks like such as are you optimizing for financial gains, social impact, building community, creating sustainability, or category mastery. In setting strategic direction, it’s just as important to choose what to do, as what not to do.
Planning provides the structure, turning strategic choices into an organized set of activities with details on who will do what, when, for how much, and what will be measured to achieve the goals.Planning is the process that assigns resources and budget, translates the direction into projects, establishes measurable milestones and goals, assigns deliverables and owners, defines and tracks schedules, establishes processes and methods for doing the work, and develops metrics and measurements to meet the goals.
How Can You Tell When You’re Strategizing Or Planning?
In my model below on Strategy and Planning Characteristics, I frame eight dimensions that distinguish the focus or mindset differences if you are defining strategy or driving planning. These eight dimensions include: Purpose or what you are trying to achieve, the type of Decision that will be made, the Outcome or aim to be ultimately delivered, the Action or nature of what you’re doing, the type of Challenge to be faced, how the Timeline will be manifested, the Approach to finding and interpreting information, and Evaluation or how information will be utilized.
Strategy and Planning Characteristics
Dimensions That Characterize Strategy
The Purpose of Strategy is to differentiate from the competition or alternatives. The decisions are the forward facing choices to clarify what direction to take and what not to take. The outcome is to create value for customers and the business or organization and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Strategy’s action is one of navigating, being nimble to maneuver around things that are unexpected. The challenge is interpreting an unknown or ambiguous space and choosing the path to steer the organization and enterprise or yourself in the direction of your desired future. There is no fixed schedule or timeline for strategy, as it is a journey of discovery. Each path you navigate, and at each fork that you decide on has consequences that you cannot go back. Hence you always need to be evaluating and sensing new information, assessing what patterns you see and connect the dots to generate meaning. The approach of strategy is always a dynamic assimilation and synthesis of ever changing information into an unknown future.
Dimensions That Characterize Planning
The purpose of Planning is utilizing a coordinated process to execute against the defined goals. Decisions that get made are allocating budget and resources, and setting schedules and deliverables to align all involved. The overall outcome is to achieve the stated objectives and make progress against the stated targets whether they be financial, schedule, quality, or completeness. The action of planning is organizing all of the pieces, people, and processes that must come together to execute the project and plans to achieve the objectives. The challenge that Planning attempts to address is reducing risk and uncertainty by specifying and aligning all to a common schedule, budget, project list, expectations for deliverables, and definition of success. In Planning, the timeline is finite and focused on a structured schedule around completing tasks to get the needed results. It is a controlled approach of data collection with evaluation focused on analyzing and refining the plan, making adjustments and setting a quantified schedule and forecast of what to expect to reach a projected future.
Recognize the value and difference of the strategy realm and the planning mode.
Being intentional about mindset and focus along each of these eight dimensions will provide clarity to navigate strategy then organize plans to guide the journey and actualize the dream.
Comentarios