Strategy vs. Goals
Thoughts on the Difference, Automation, and Frameworks
As a vendor of strategic planning software, we have noticed a peculiar trend:
Sometimes our tool is used not for strategic planning, as intended, but for general task/project management.
While this does not pose any issues (the subscriptions are still paid), it has led me to consider what makes (or should make) strategic planning tools distinct from general-purpose project/goal management software.
Why do these users prefer our tool over more affordable goal tracking SaaS options? A short answer:
Strategic planning tools excel at handling uncertainty.
Strategy is about Dealing with Uncertainty
A typical project falls within the ‘Known-Known’ or ‘Known-Unknown’ quadrant.
In other words:
— Either we have a clear understanding of what needs to be done to complete the tasks or
— There is a plan to develop an unclear goal into practical steps.
In strategic planning, the goals go beyond the scope of “business as usual”. They involve a higher level of uncertainty. This is why one definition of strategy is ‘validating hypotheses through execution.’
For example, in our marketing efforts (see the screenshot above), we rely on content marketing (long reads, evergreen content, and in-depth case analyses). We recently updated the website to improve navigation for this content. This decision wasn’t as simple as ‘Let’s enhance the navigation’ (if it were that straightforward, why didn’t we do it earlier?). Instead, it was rooted in the understanding that improved navigation leads to enhanced user experience, successful SEO + some best practices uncovered incidentally. And it’s still unclear whether the new navigation is successful. We need to monitor user behavior over time to assess its impact.
Goal Tracking vs Strategy Tracking
The degree of uncertainty in strategic planning affects the requirements for goal tracking:
— Goals are not just a list of tasks but rather a direction to follow. (e.g., ‘Achieving excellence in content marketing’ as the main goal, with ‘Improving Customer Experience on the Website’ as a sub-goal and ‘Clear navigation’ as a rationale for the sub-goal).
— Even when a specific initiative aligns with a goal, uncertainty persists. It’s insufficient to track only immediate outputs; we need metrics to assess the long-term impact of the implemented initiative.
— Strategic planning isn’t about isolated goals. We need a deeper understanding of the operational environment, formulating hypotheses, risks, and success factors. For instance, with the rise of generative AI, we must adjust our content marketing strategy.
Strategic Goals Are Not SMART by Definition
A long-term planning horizon is another characteristic of a more ‘strategic’ approach to goals. A good, SMART objective is supposed to be time-bound, but strategic goals (such as ‘Excellence in content marketing’) cannot be confined within a specific time frame. Nor is it a process that fits the ‘business as usual’ paradigm with well-defined inputs and outputs.
Strategic goals exist in the realm of the unknown.
We do value-based decomposition for such goals, formulating sub-goals (which ideally should be SMART) and new initiatives, learning along the way, and continuously formulating and validating new hypotheses.
OKR Framework Reinvented for Strategic Planning
There is a paradox regarding the selection of business frameworks:
— The Balanced Scorecard framework is designed for strategy execution.
— Frameworks like OKRs are meant for goal tracking and prioritization.
In practice, the implementation varies from company to company:
— We’ve worked with clients who ‘balance’ their scorecards by rearranging goals into perspectives (even though these goals were far from being strategic).
— We’ve also observed clients (which is a growing trend today) that have started with OKRs for goal settings and have adapted the approach to address more strategic objectives.
The Strategy Implementation System is an article on Medium where I connect the dots about strategic planning, including its Goals component.
Summary
The degree of uncertainty one deals is crucial when selecting business frameworks and automation tools.
It also appears to be a criterion for assessing the quality of strategic planning. Given the ever-increasing complexity and volatility of the current business environment, having a fixed strategy without metrics to track performance and an established process to work with hypotheses seems unrealistic.
