Want More Accountability? Start With A Better Strategic Plan

Over the course of 25 years in the consulting industry, I’ve seen hundreds of strategic plans. Most of them were junk. Not because there wasn’t a rigorous creation process that consumed untold hours of the team’s time. And not because the team didn’t put in the effort. It’s because what passes for strategy is often just a list of tactics grouped together by function.

The problem is further exacerbated by the interplay between budgets and strategy. Leaders call for innovative ideas and out-of-the-box thinking with the unspoken constraint of not impeding growth or requiring more resources. Everyone is trying to “build the plane while flying it,” even if that is a highly improbable thing to do.

How do we escape these time-honored traditions of over-investment in the template and under-investment in the thinking?

One place to start is with better questions:

• What are our customers telling us about our product or services? What do they wish we could do differently? What unmet needs are they struggling with?
• How has the competitive landscape changed in the last six months? How do we anticipate it changing in the next year? What are our competitors doing faster, better, or differently than we are?
• What is our organization uniquely good at? Are we fully leveraging these capabilities on behalf of our customers?
• How can we leverage technology, AI in particular, to deliver a better experience for customers and / or to improve how we work internally?

Once you’ve gotten a thorough lay of the land, it’s time to start looking towards the future. One common error is to focus on wordsmithing a lofty but ultimately meaningless vision. Focus on translating your high-level vision into specific milestones to create a strategy that has accountability baked into it.

A milestone is a specific result that you will achieve within a designated timeframe. I suggest starting with “By the end of 2026, we will have…” and building your milestones from there. It seems obvious, but I’ve seen many teams struggling to phrase their milestones as past-tense accomplishments versus forward-looking goals.

Once you have a year-end milestone, then you work backwards from there to map them out in quarterly increments. Imagine, for example, that your team’s milestone is “By the end of 2026, we will have significantly increased awareness of our organization with target customers.” Then perhaps by the end of Q3 you will have “published a minimum of three articles in respected outlets that reach our target customers.” What you should start to see as the roadmap takes shape is a set of logical milestones that build towards the ultimate achievement.

Once the milestones are complete, the team can map out the tactics that are expected to produce the milestones. Review the roadmap on a quarterly basis to assess whether the tactics are doing their job. If not, change the tactics, not the milestones.

The purpose of a strategy is to guide action, enable prioritization, and to drive accountability. How it is constructed makes a big impact on whether it serves its purpose well or not at all.