The Plan Is Not the Point
It may begin with identifying the need for a robust strategy, but the plan that makes it real is one of the differences between organisations that talk about strategy and those that are built on one.
I'm currently working with an organisation on its three-year strategic plan. Alongside it, we're building the operational plan that sits underneath it.
Some boards would see the second document as a formality. A translation exercise. Something the executive team can tidy up once the "real" strategic thinking is done.
I've come to see it differently. The operational plan isn't downstream of the strategy. It's what determines whether the strategy was ever real to begin with.
Strategy is getting harder, and it's getting worse.
Research summarised by McKinsey in Harvard Business Review this year found that the quality of corporate strategies has fallen by roughly 40% over the past fifteen years. Not because leaders are thinking less carefully. Because the environment strategy is meant to respond to (technological disruption, shifting competitive dynamics, compressed decision cycles) is now moving faster than the tools built to manage it.
At exactly the moment strategy needs to be sharper, it's getting blunter.
But the harder truth is this: strategy quality isn't even the biggest differentiator.
The same body of McKinsey research, drawn from more than 400 companies across industries and geographies, found something that should unsettle anyone who treats a strategy document as the finish line. The single biggest gap between organisations that land at the top of the performance curve and those that fall to the bottom isn't the brilliance of the strategy itself.
It's mobilisation. The unglamorous, unfinished work of turning a decision into organisational readiness: matching the right leaders to the right initiatives, allocating resources to match stated priorities, translating intent into plans that teams can actually act on.
Most organisations invest heavily in the first part. Far fewer invest as seriously in the second.
In governance terms, this is a familiar failure.
Boards are comfortable approving strategy. It's a clean decision, made in a single meeting, with a clear beginning and end. Operational delivery is messier — it lives in budgets, in role clarity, in the everyday judgement calls of people who weren't in the room when the strategy was agreed. Research into association and nonprofit governance suggests a majority of strategic plans stall precisely here: a board approves a unified set of goals, and staff are left to reconcile them against limited capacity and unclear priorities no one thought to spell out.
Approving a strategy is not the same as ensuring the organisation can act on it.
There's a useful reframe for this, from a different but related piece of writing.
Jana Werner and Phil Le-Brun, writing in Harvard Business Review, describe most organisations as "Tin Man Orgs": built for a complicated world of knowable processes and top-down control. However, the world they now operate in is genuinely complex: adaptive, uncertain, more like an ocean than a machine. Their alternative, the "Octopus Organization," distributes intelligence rather than concentrating it, trusting the people closest to the work to sense what's changing and to shape how the organisation responds.
Applied to strategic planning, the implication is straightforward. If the people who will deliver a plan aren't involved in shaping how it gets delivered, the plan is being designed for a complicated world that no longer exists. It looks tidy on paper. It rarely survives contact with reality.
When it works, the pattern is consistent.
When Tufan Erginbilgiç became CEO of Rolls-Royce in 2023, he brought around 500 leaders into the strategy process before the choices were finalised, so that by the time decisions were made, the people responsible for executing them had already helped shape them. Three years on, underlying operating profit had reached a record £3.5 billion.
That's not a story about a better strategy document. It's a story about an organisation that mobilised.
For the organisation I'm working with now, this is exactly the discipline we're trying to build in.
Not a strategic plan followed, eventually, by an operational one. Both, built together, with the people who will be accountable for delivery involved from early on, so that the plan is not just approved, but genuinely owned.
The strategy tells you where you're going. The operational plan is the only part of the exercise that tells you whether you'll actually get there.
If your board has approved a strategy this year, it's worth asking honestly: has as much thought gone into how it gets delivered as went into deciding what it should say?
Sources: McKinsey research, "How to Ensure Your Company Acts on Your New Strategy," Harvard Business Review, July 2026, and "How Strategy Champions Win," McKinsey Quarterly, 2025. Jana Werner and Phil Le-Brun, "Become an Octopus Organization," Harvard Business Review, November–December 2025.
