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Jory MacKay on July 23, 2025

Jory MacKay

Jory is a writer, content strategist and award-winning editor of the Unsplash Book. He contributes to Inc., Fast Company, Quartz, and more.

July 23, 2025 · 10 min read

Most business leaders can tell you what a strategy is, but not many can actually deliver one. In fact, a recent Forbes study shows that between 60% and 90% of business strategies fail before they even launch!

The strategic planning process guides leaders through turning their vision into an actionable roadmap that enables their business to thrive.

But it isn’t a “one and done” exercise. Instead, strategic planning is a continuous process of defining a vision, communicating it to teams, learning lessons from what goes right, and what goes wrong, and adjusting accordingly.

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If you’re a leader who’s tried other strategy frameworks and wants something that actually works, then this article is for you.

What is the strategic planning process? Why does it matter?

Strategic planning is the process of defining an organizational mission, vision, and values, then creating a roadmap of goals, objectives, and activities to achieve it.

Strategic planning isn’t something that’s done once and then forgotten about. Instead, it’s a continuous process where leaders set the strategy, communicate it to managers and team leaders, then adapt as new information emerges and lessons are learned.

Strategic planning is important as it gives everyone in the organization a North Star to aim for.

Good strategy ensures everyone is pulling in the same direction and that all parts of the business are contributing to the same high-level objective.

Outside providing strategic direction, here are some of the other benefits strategic planning brings to organizations:

• Helps to track company progress. A clearly defined strategy sets a baseline for organizations to measure their progress against. Whether it’s revenue targets, business expenses, customer experience, or employee satisfaction, a good strategy should include measurable performance indicators to track going forward.
• Enables resource planning. Once you know what’s important to your businesses’ success, it’s easier to prioritize resources against the right things. This includes starting the right projects and stopping those that don’t contribute to your business goals.
• Creates a framework for decision-making. In the same vein, with key goals and objectives defined, your strategy provides a framework to make decisions. Every decision, made at every level, should align with and positively contribute to the broader strategy.
• Promotes long-term thinking. When everyone has a North Star to aim for, it encourages teams to think “heads up” rather than “heads down”. This makes it easier for everyone to get out of the details and see the bigger picture their work contributes to.
• Builds a stronger culture. When everyone’s pulling in the same direction, it builds a strong sense of purpose across your teams. This makes your company a better place to work, with employees more engaged, productive, and collaborative as a result.

But if strategic planning is so great, why do so many strategies go wrong?

How is strategic planning different from other types of planning?

One of the key reasons the strategic planning process fails is because leaders become too tactical, crossing over into other mid-term or short-term planning processes.

To help you differentiate, here’s how strategic planning compares to other common business planning cycles:

Put simply, strategic planning sets the vision, mission, and long-term objectives of your organization. It should be high-level, sitting at the top of the pyramid to provide the direction for all other plans to align to.

What to include in the strategic planning process: 6 key elements

By the end of the strategic planning process, you should have a comprehensive view of where your business is, and where you want it to be in the next 2 – 3 years.

If you’re starting completely from scratch, this will include defining:

• Vision: An aspirational/abstract statement of what your business will achieve or how it will be seen in the next 2 to 3 years. E.g., a former BBC vision statement was “To be the most creative organization in the world”.
• Mission: A business mission gives a clear intention of where the organization wants to be and what it wants to do. This is slightly more performance focused and will often focus on areas such as sales volume, profit, efficiency, or customer satisfaction. E.g., “To be the most trusted car dealership in the US, with annual profit above $100m.”
• Values: Business values are the beliefs and behaviors everyone should embody to enable them to achieve the vision and mission. Examples include integrity, honesty, accountability, customer commitment, respect, innovation, and teamwork.
• Objectives and Goals: Measurable targets for business performance which, if achieved, enable the organization to achieve their mission. E.g., achieve yearly revenue of $200m, achieve 80% customer satisfaction.
• Strategy: A strategy is a roadmap of actions, activities, and decisions that contribute to achieving objectives and goals. E.g., to achieve an annual revenue of $200m, we will grow our Sales team and invest in additional partnership deals with re-sellers.
• KPIs: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurable indicators of progress towards an objective. E.g., for the $200m revenue target, a quarterly KPI of $50m revenue would indicate whether the objective is on track.

7 steps to complete the strategic planning process

Like many things in business, strategic planning is easier when you follow a set of clear steps that guide you carefully through the process.

Let’s look at how to take you through defining your strategic plan, including your vision, mission, values, and objectives.

1. Perform an “environment scan”

Before you jump straight into defining your vision, mission, or strategy, you must set the groundwork by doing some research on your business environment. Take time to understand your strengths and weaknesses, your market position, and what competitors are doing around you.

Some tips and resources to help:

• Complete an internal SWOT analysis. Start by completing your internal company analysis, using a Strength, Weaknesses, Threats, and Opportunities (SWOT) assessment. This will give you a clear understanding of your own business, identifying areas you can exploit, areas for improvement, and risks to keep an eye on.
• Check external factors using the PESTLE method. Now you’ve looked inwards, take the time to scan your external environment using a PESTLE analysis. PESTLE stands for Political, Environmental, Sociological, Technological, Legal, and Economic, encouraging you to consider every aspect of the world around you which could impact your business in the medium to long term.
• Get industry-specific with a competitor analysis. With the environment analyzed, finish up with a look at your competitors. Here, you’ll look at your target market, customer demand, and competitor strengths, before defining your own unique selling points (USP). Check out the Planio guide to Competitive Analysis, including our free, easy-to-use template.
  

2. Clarify and update your vision, mission, and values

With the foundation set, it’s time to start working from the top down to the bottom, setting your vision, mission, and values first. These take time, and will likely need a couple of rounds of iterating between you and leadership colleagues.

Some questions to ask:

• What makes you different? When defining your vision, mission, and value, it’s important to think about what makes you different from your competitors. If everyone is the same, you won’t stand out, so use your SWOT strengths to capitalize on areas you can add the most value.
• What are your values? A catchy vision statement and an impressive mission aren’t worth anything if your people don’t buy-in to your company ethos. Values directly link to your organizational culture, so consider the type of environment you want to create when scoping your values. This includes striving for psychological safety, having team rituals, and rewarding employees fairly.

Real like example:

John is the CEO of EnviroPlant, an app that allows users to plant trees to offset their carbon footprint. John works with his team to redefine their vision, mission, and values. They decide on a vision statement of ‘We sow the seeds of a better world’, a mission statement ‘To be the most used carbon offsetting app in the UK’, and values of ‘Trust, Integrity, Disruptive, and Caring’.

3. Set company objectives and goals

Once your vision, mission, and values are set, it’s time to move down the pyramid and define the objective and goals that will take you there. Here you start to get slightly more tactical, focusing on quantifiable targets that connect the work your team does to the overarching mission.

Some tips and resources to help:

• Set SMART goals. Setting goals and objectives is much easier when you follow a framework, and SMART is one of the most popular. Standing for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Based, SMART objectives help you set goals you and your teams can actually get done. Check out the Planio Ultimate Guide to Setting Goals that Get Accomplished to learn more.
• Spread the objectives around. When setting organizational objectives, it’s important to spread the objectives across all areas of business. This ensures everyone has a clear part to play in the company’s success, whether it’s driving sales, becoming more efficient, improving customer service, or developing great products.

Real life example:

To help EnviroPlant meet their vision and mission, John defines three strategic objectives:

• “Increase app downloads to 10,000 per month”,
• “Plant 50,000 trees per year”,
• “Achieve a 90% + yearly customer satisfaction score”.

Studies show that between 60% and 90% of business strategies fail before they even launch!

4. Define your strategic roadmap

With the objectives and goals set, it’s time to work out how you’ll achieve them, by defining your strategic roadmap. For many organizations, you may have a series of strategies for each major department, all of which contribute towards the relevant high-level goals.

Make sure you think about these different “levels” of strategy:

• Department strategy. When defining key department or business unit strategies, make sure they’re fit for purpose. There’s no point giving the support team a target to drive more revenue, or the HR department a customer satisfaction goal, so tailor each strategy to the team at hand.
• Product strategy. If you work in a product-based team, your roadmap should be broken down into the high-level features and capabilities you’ll deliver to meet the organizational goals. Use the Planio Product Strategy 101 Guide to walk you through the process.
• Strategy vs. tactics. While you don’t want to get too tactical, consider the actual activities or initiatives you’ll implement to get you closer to your strategy. For example, the customer service team may invest in AI chatbots to speed up customer interactions and increase satisfaction.

Real life example:

John works with Sally, the Customer Service Director, to define a strategic roadmap that will help achieve the 90% + customer satisfaction objective. They plan to implement new AI tools, invest in additional team training, and increase the size of the team by 5% to help them provide a faster and more efficient service.

5. Define critical performance metrics

Key performance indicators (KPIs) will be the critical metrics that help you measure if your new strategy is working. Without them, it’s difficult to determine if you’re making progress, with no information to help you course correct as you move forward.

Some tips and resources to help:

• Use North Star metrics. Much like your goals and objectives, the best KPIs are simple to understand, easy to measure, realistic, and achievable. The North Star metric framework is a good place to start, ensuring you pitch your KPIs at the right level while ensuring they link up to your strategy, goals, and vision.
• Check in — but not too often. When it comes to KPIs, the timing of when you assess your progress is key. Do them too often, and you overanalyze performance, wasting time on constant data collection. Do them too infrequently, and you miss the chance to learn lessons and make changes. Most companies monitor key KPIs monthly or quarterly to strike the right balance.

Real life example:

EnviroPlant’s current customer satisfaction rating is 72%, so Sally agrees to update John and the rest of the leadership team monthly on their progress. If good progress is made in the first three months, they agree to reduce the updates to every quarter to optimize time and resources.

6. Cascade your plan across the organization

Great work — you’ve defined your vision, mission, values, objectives, strategy, and KPIs, and it’s time to share them across the organization. Remember, it’s the teams that will do the work to achieve your objectives, so ensure your information cascade is as clear and informative as possible.

Some tips and resources to help:

• Mix up your communication methods. Simply writing down your objectives and sending them in an email won’t work. Consider a range of communication styles in your approach, using techniques such as one-to-one meetings, town halls, leader cascade and asynchronous communication to ensure the message resonates with everyone.
• Use Planio to help. When it comes to the strategic planning process, Planio is the perfect tool to help you develop, document, and distribute all of your important strategy communications. Integrated communication tools such as Wiki, File Storage, and Team Chat make Planio the single location for storing all your important information, inviting your team to collaborate and exchange ideas in one palace.

Real life example:

John uses the next company town hall to share the executive summary of the vision, mission, and strategy with employees, including an interactive Q&A. Each of the directors follows this up with further communications in their team members and one-to-ones, and shares updates on their department intranet pages.

7. Monitor performance, welcome feedback, and adapt

As we’ve said from the beginning, the strategic planning process isn’t a one-time exercise. Once launched, you must constantly monitor your performance, collect feedback, and adapt as you learn lessons and uncover new information.

Some tips and resources to help:

• Look for positives & negatives. When you launch your strategy for the first time, it’s important to look for both positive and negative feedback. Oftentimes, employees won’t want to say anything negative to upper management, so make space for honest feedback through anonymous channels and by creating a no barriers culture.
• Lessons learned. The strategic planning process is complex, and it’s unlikely you’ll get it right the first time. Once you’ve completed your first cycle, take the time to capture lessons learned, giving equal focus to what went well, and what you could improve for the future.

Strategic plan template: Use this to get started on your own plan

The strategic planning process can feel overwhelming at first. But the best place to start is by filling in what you know about your organization’s vision, mission, and high-level goals using this free outline template. From there, you can expand into more details and tactics.

Strategic planning isn’t done once and then forgotten about. It’s a continuous process.

Final thoughts: Avoid these common strategic planning pitfalls

Even with a defined strategic planning process, there are many reasons that most business strategies fail before they even launch. Let’s take a look at some of the most common and how to avoid them.

• Failing to connect your strategy with more tactical planning. Once your strategy is set, you must encourage your teams to make their own tactical plans to contribute to objectives and goals. That’s not your job, but you should work to enable those teams to come up with the right tactics themselves to succeed.
• Ignoring real-time insights and data. It’s important to set and monitor clear KPIs to help you track your performance. Fail to do that, and you won’t know if you’re heading in the right direction, leaving you helpless to take the right actions to get you back on track.
• Not creating a feedback loop within the company. Some leaders simply think they know best, and once they’ve defined their strategy don’t care for feedback. Instead, put energy into using feedback to optimize your strategic plan.
• Being unrealistic about what you can accomplish. Many strategies fail because they’re disconnected from reality. Instead, focus on incremental 1 — 3 year plans that show clear progress and help you move forward at a reasonable pace.

If you’re diving into the strategic planning process and need a tool to help you manage the development, documentation, and dissemination of your ideas, Planio is the perfect choice. With features for everything from project management to team chat, it has everything you and your teams need to get organized, communicate, and drive forward a revolutionary business strategy!

Try Planio with your own team — free for 30 days (no credit card required!)