Strategy is not the same as planning

10/3/2025 ☼ not-knowing ☼ risk ☼ uncertainty ☼ meaningmaking ☼ strategy ☼ planning

This is #1 in a series on seven tensions that lead to common misunderstandings about strategy.

The line between strategy and planning (or “strategic planning”) is often blurry in organisations — more on why that is later. But it pays to be very clear about what strategy is and how it is fundamentally different from planning.

Planning must come after strategy

Planning is selecting and deciding the order of actions in already-interpreted situations, in order to achieve already-chosen outcomes. It assumes you’ve already figured out your resources, constraints, and operating environment. Planning is hugely important, very difficult, and requires much discipline. But it happens after strategy.

If strategy isn’t planning, what is it?

Strategy is the act of making difficult choices when there’s no clear answer: in other words, when there is uncertainty. These choices include choosing which of multiple outcomes to value and pursue (and which ones to devalue and ignore), diagnosing and making sense of ambiguous environments to decide how to respond to them, or deciding how to interpret different parts of the environment as either resources or constraints. Strategy creates the inputs for planning.

Strategic choices are difficult because they mean committing to a direction despite uncertainty about whether that direction is the “correct” one. And a big part of strategy work is recognizing that uncertainty is not the same as risk and cannot be math-ed out and optimised the same way.

Real strategy is hard for different reasons

Real strategy is both cognitively hard (like planning is) and affectively hard — it is uncomfortable and scary because confronting uncertainty is uncomfortable and scary. And non-risk uncertainty is increasingly unavoidable. This is why real strategy is important.

Roger Martin has an excellent HBR essay (link at the end) that goes right to the point: “All executives know that strategy is important. But almost all also find it scary, because it forces them to confront a future they can only guess at. Worse, actually choosing a strategy entails making decisions that explicitly cut off possibilities and options. An executive may well fear that getting those decisions wrong will wreck his or her career.

The natural reaction is to make the challenge less daunting by turning it into a problem that can be solved with tried and tested tools. That nearly always means spending weeks or even months preparing a comprehensive plan for how the company will invest in existing and new assets and capabilities in order to achieve a target—an increased share of the market, say, or a share in some new one. The plan is typically supported with detailed spreadsheets that project costs and revenue quite far into the future. By the end of the process, everyone feels a lot less scared.

This is a truly terrible way to make strategy. It may be an excellent way to cope with fear of the unknown, but fear and discomfort are an essential part of strategy making.”

Planning without strategy is the tail wagging the dog

If your strategy function consists only of planning (even if it is called “strategic planning”), your organisation may be inadvertently avoiding genuinely important and difficult confrontations with uncertainty.

Get in touch if you’d like to talk about implementing these insights in your organization.

Martin’s essay “The big lie of strategic planning,” is absolutely worth reading:

I’ve been working on tools for learning how to turn discomfort into something productive. idk is the first of these tools.

And I’ve spent the last 15 years investigating how organisations can design themselves to be good at working in uncertainty by clearly distinguishing it from risk.