Dear Pragmatic Planner,
I can imagine where you might be coming from with this question. Like so many of us, you may have seen strategy processes consumed by envisioning what could be, heavy on big-picture vision but light on what it might take to get there. The resulting strategies can struggle to offer practical guidance.
On the flip side, I have also seen strategy processes cling too tightly to what we’re comfortable committing to, inadvertently reinforcing organizational inertia. This approach can produce strategies that are more like glorified budget narratives, coordinating incremental change without confronting an organization’s deeper strategic questions.
The greatest incoherence seems to occur when the juxtaposition of the terms strategic and planning is taken too far. This happens when strategy dreams up a big, hairy, audacious goal, then proceeds to take the form of a concrete plan. The SMART goals and methodical, multiyear timelines that result can often have little bearing on reality. These are the processes that get mocked as “strategy theater.”
Is it even possible to reconcile our dreams of what could be with the present realities of what we’re comfortable committing to in strategy? I think so. These orientations can make sense together if we think of them as living in separate but entangled planes of organizational life.
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