Almost to number 1! This is definitely one of my favorites, and it ties into much of the work that Jeff and I do over at Association Renewal in our "Building Strategic Capacity" projects. I actually first put these ideas down in an earlier post on this blog, and then expanded on it for the book.

Strategy and Planning Are Not the Same
The association community is almost obsessed with strategic planning. Although more room is now being given to the dissenting opinion that perhaps the way we have always done strategic planning is no longer serving us, there are still many out there who stand unquestioningly behind their two-day retreats, their SWOT analyses, and their thirty-nine-page, three-ring-bound strategic plans that effectively become “credenza-ware” for the next two to three years.

There are many problems with traditional strategic planning, and we address several in this book. One critical problem is literally the combination of those two words: strategic and planning. Everyone agrees that associations need strategy. Without a clear strategy, associations can only be reactive, and that is unlikely to generate long-term success. A strategy exists to guide proactive decision-making and should reflect careful thinking about how and why the association will succeed.

Organizations also need planning. It’s not enough simply to know where you are headed. If you ignore the details of how you are going to get there, then you are likely to end up in a significantly different place, or at the right place, but at the wrong time.

But combining strategy and planning (as is done in traditional strategic planning) is very dangerous, because strategy and planning are very different things. The strategy is incredibly important and relatively stable and constant. It should take a significant amount of information and conversation to produce a strategic change. Planning, on the other hand, does not have that weight. It is a means to an end, and should be much more flexible. But when we combine strategy and plan, we end up adding the weight of the strategy to the plan, and this creates dangerous inflexibility.

Consultant and author Jeffrey Pfeffer recently wrote about a CEO who was heading toward failure because he had “convinced himself that his strategy was the only way to go.” As Pfeffer said, “if you become so attached to your course of action that proving it right becomes more important than your overall success, chances are you are not going to succeed.” (Business 2.0, November 2005)

When plans are too tightly linked to the strategy, then they actually invite blind commitment (“but it’s part of the strategic plan—we can’t change that?!”). While of course your planning process should involve an awareness of and discussion of the strategy, there needs to be some distance, so everyone will be clear about when they are making a strategic move versus when they are modifying a means to an end. The trick is to think and act strategically while modifying your plans, and to do that we recommend simply, but powerfully, changing your language. Talk about strategy. Talk about planning. But do not talk about (or do) strategic planning.