Reviews
Part of Strategic planning: steps, examples and decisions for 2027
Strategic planning examples: lessons and useful context
Strategic planning lines rewritten one at a time: the three-question test, six worked examples, the words that hide a choice, and where vagueness is honest.
Plans fail as sentences before they fail as strategy. A line that reads well in a slide, that everyone nods at, and that nobody could act on differently tomorrow than they did yesterday, is where most planning effort ends up.
So this page is a rewriting clinic. Each example below is a line of the kind that appears in real plans, with what is missing and a version that forces somebody to do something. Nothing here describes an actual organization; the lines are constructed to show the edit.
What to take away
- A plan line earns its place only if you can name who does what differently because of it. If nobody's Monday changes, delete the line.
- Most vague plan language is hiding an unmade decision, not a writing problem. Fix the decision and the sentence writes itself.
- Precision about the decision beats precision about the outcome. You can commit to what you will do and when you will look; you cannot commit to what the market does.
The test to apply to every line
Read the sentence and answer three questions. Who does something differently? What do they stop doing to make room? How will we know, and by when, whether it was the wrong call?
If a line survives all three, keep it. If it fails the first, it is decoration. If it fails the second, it is an addition to a full queue and will be resolved later by individuals dropping things quietly. If it fails the third, it will run until the money does.
Six lines, rewritten
Before: "Grow revenue in the mid-market segment."
Missing: who sells to them, what is being taken away to free the time, and what happens to the customers who currently absorb it.
After: "Two of the four sellers move to mid-market accounts from the start of the second quarter. Small accounts they currently hold go to self-service, and we accept the churn that produces. If mid-market pipeline has not doubled by the end of the third quarter, they move back."
That version can be wrong, which is the point. It also has a cost printed on it, which is what makes it a choice.
Before: "Improve customer onboarding."
Missing: which part, and whose. Onboarding is four different processes wearing one name.
After: "The first thirty days is the part failing. One person owns the sequence end to end, including the two steps that currently sit in another team. The measure is how many customers reach first real use without asking us a question."
The rewrite does most of its work by naming a boundary. Deciding where a process starts and ends is usually the harder half; operating processes covers why the boundary is where this kind of work fails. Drawing that boundary before writing the line is the same first step as in business process mapping, where the scope decision determines everything downstream.
Before: "Become more data-driven in our decision making."
Missing: any decision. This line describes an atmosphere.
After: "Three recurring decisions move from opinion to a stated rule: which accounts get a call, which defects hold a release, and which requests we decline. Each gets one number, an owner, and a written threshold, by the end of the quarter. We will find that at least one of the three cannot be reduced to a number, and that is a useful result."
Before: "Continue to invest in quality."
Missing: the word "continue" means no change is being requested. A plan line that requests no change is a description of the present.
After: either delete it, or say what increases: "The release gate moves from the delivery team to a second reviewer, which will slow releases by a day or two. We accept that." One of those is honest. The current line is neither.
Before: "Explore opportunities in adjacent markets."
Missing: exploring costs somebody's weeks and there is no threshold at which exploration stops.
After: "One person spends four weeks talking to buyers in the adjacent segment and comes back with a written answer to one question: would they buy the current product with no changes? If the answer is no, we do not pursue it this year."
Before: "Build a scalable platform to support future growth."
Missing: which future, and what breaks first at what volume. Without those, "scalable" is an adjective the engineering team is expected to interpret and will be blamed for interpreting differently from you.
After: "At three times current volume, the manual reconciliation step is what fails; it needs two people at that point and we will not have them. That step is what gets built out this year. Nothing else about the system is being changed for scale."
The words that hide the choice
Certain words appear in plans precisely because the choice underneath them has not been made. When you find one, do not rewrite the sentence. Go and make the decision.
| Word or phrase | What it usually means | What to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Continue to | Nothing changes | Then why is it in the plan? |
| Focus on | We have added a priority and removed none | What comes off the list? |
| Explore | Nobody has been given the time | Who, for how long, and what answer ends it? |
| Optimize | We do not know which direction | Which number goes up, and which is allowed to fall? |
| Where appropriate | The exception has not been defined | Who decides, and on what basis? |
| Support the business | This is a function's whole job description | Which specific request are you now able to say no to? |
| Best in class | We have not chosen a comparison | Compared with whom, on what measure? |
| Enable | The doing belongs to someone else | Have they agreed, and is it in their plan? |
The last one causes more delivery failure than any of the others. A plan full of enabling commitments describes work that another team has not agreed to do and has not counted in its own capacity.
What a usable line contains
Five elements, and a line rarely needs more than three of them.
- A subject who can act. A named person or a single team, not a function and not "the business."
- A verb somebody can perform. Move, stop, hire, decline, rewrite, publish. Not strengthen, drive, embed or ensure.
- A date, or an event that starts the clock. "By the end of the second quarter" or "once the migration finishes."
- Something given up. The work that stops, the request now declined, the number allowed to get worse.
- A stated result that would end it. Written before anyone is attached to the outcome, which is the whole argument of the strategic planning pillar.
Three of these, in one sentence, is a plan line. Two adjectives and a direction is not.
Where the vagueness is honest
Not every soft line is a failure. Some things genuinely cannot be pinned down, and forcing a number onto them produces false precision that is worse than the original.
The move in that case is to be exact about the decision rather than the outcome. You cannot commit to what a market does. You can commit to who is watching it, what they are watching, when they report, and what each result causes you to do next. That converts an unknowable forecast into a schedule of decisions, and it is the only form of confidence a plan can honestly carry.
Similarly, some work is exploratory by nature. Say so plainly, cap the spend, and name the question being answered. An explicitly bounded experiment is a legitimate plan item. An unbounded one described in confident language is not. What separates a trial that can answer something from one that cannot is mostly the comparison and the stopping rule, which is the subject of experimental design.
Before you circulate it
Two checks that take ten minutes and catch most of what is wrong.
Hand the plan to somebody who will have to decline a request because of it and ask them to point at the line that authorizes the refusal. If they cannot find one, the plan will not survive its first difficult conversation, and the person who tries to enforce it will be alone.
Then read only the verbs. Aloud, with the rest of each sentence removed. A list of verbs that nobody could be filmed doing is a list of intentions. This test is unkind and takes a minute.
The rollout of any of this, including what people are entitled to hear about what stops, belongs to change management, and the question of whose capacity these lines are drawing on belongs to team management.
Common questions
Does this level of specificity not make the plan brittle?
The specific version is easier to change, because you can see what it committed to and what would falsify it. A vague plan is not flexible; it is unrevisable, since nothing in it is definite enough to have become wrong.
Our leadership prefers the language I have been told to delete.
Keep the summary in whatever register is expected, and hold the operating version separately, with the dates and the subtractions. Two audiences, two documents. The failure to avoid is having only the first one, where the specifics were never written anywhere.
Where should the rewriting happen?
In the room, out loud, while the people who will do the work are present. Editing a plan afterward produces sentences that are tidier and still contain no decision, because the decision was never made in the room.
