Three disciplines of strategic planning

Strategic planning is the art of choosing where to invest business resources. 

Strategic planning is essential for businesses to navigate the constantly evolving market landscape and changing consumer trends. Whether your business is experiencing minor tremors or significant disruptions or looking for exponential growth, systematically assessing business performance, identifying value areas, and defining future capabilities is critical to maintaining sustainable business growth.

We believe three disciplines make or break the success of your strategic plan

1. Constrained freedom ​

Successful strategic planning demands balancing future-focused planning with a review of today’s current activity. Reviewing and stopping activity can be as potent as identifying what needs to be done, freeing up valuable resources and headspace to undertake activities capable of delivering sustainable value and material change.​

We always begin our strategic planning by immersing ourselves in understanding commercial performance and operational focus. When we align the numbers with where time is spent, we can evaluate what’s working and what’s not, where opportunities lie, and where we need to say no.

2. Constrained, creative thinking

While constrained creative thinking may seem contradictory. There’s no point in developing ideas or a plan that can’t be executed.

In creative industries such as architecture and advertising, clients are often asked to provide “the freedom of a tight brief.” This process offers a double bubble: ensuring the response meets the client’s needs and offering a creative license to challenge expectations.

A good strategy is something that those in the organisation can feasibly implement. While unconstrained thinking can help address innovation challenges, strategic thinking needs to be framed with constraints, e.g., capital requirements or the cost of market entry. If you cannot feasibly implement a strategy, your long-term vision and strategy may be muddled.

3. Action and traction

To execute strategies, organisations need to ensure they have the correct balance of capital, capability, and capacity available to make things happen. Planning for change means identifying what’s required and ensuring it’s available so the organisation can act. Without this, a strategy is simply a document that’s likely to end up as a lost file somewhere.

Over the years, our experience has shaped our planning methodologies, ensuring we develop commercially robust, action-oriented growth strategies for clients.