Recently, I was in conversation with an organization I’ve known for a long time, one I supported in its early stages as the founders shaped their vision and aligned their initial direction. Back then, the work was bold, exploratory, and hopeful. We didn’t know exactly what it would become, but we were trying to name a future that felt preferable and meaningful.
This time, I was meeting with a new operations lead—someone thoughtful, grounded, and deeply invested in making the organization’s vision operational. The remaining founder was still actively involved, working hard to create the space for others to lead and bring the mission to life in new ways.
They’d reached out for help with “strategic planning.”
But as we talked, it became clear that what they needed wasn’t strategy work, at least not in the way I understand it. They weren’t trying to choose between multiple paths. They had already made a number of key strategic decisions. Their programs were growing. They were expanding into new areas. They were clear about what they were doing and why it mattered.
What they were missing was a structure to carry those decisions forward. They needed a plan: tools, frameworks, timelines, and systems to support consistent, focused execution. What they wanted was process, ways to turn intention into action and to stay the course in the face of new ideas and ongoing demands.
In particular, the ops lead spoke candidly about the challenges of working alongside a rainmaker founder—someone with a natural instinct for opportunity and a constant stream of new ideas. While that’s often a gift, it can also create anxiety for the people charged with delivering on existing commitments.
And so, as often happens, the phrase strategic planning had become a catch-all for something the organization knew it needed, but hadn’t quite defined.
That’s what made me reflect again on a question I think all mission-driven organizations would do well to ask:
Do you know what you’re looking for? Do you need a strategy? A plan? Or both? And just as importantly, what kind of experience do you want your team to have along the way?
Language Confuses Us
Part of the confusion stems from the phrase itself: strategic planning. We throw it around like it’s a singular process, but it’s not. It’s two very different kinds of work.
This confusion isn’t new, but it’s important. And I credit Roger Martin for helping me understand why.
Martin, a former Dean of the Rotman School of Management and one of the most influential thinkers on strategy in the last two decades, has argued for years that strategy and planning are not the same thing—and combining them into “strategic planning” is a recipe for mediocrity.
Martin writes that planning is not strategy. Planning is the process of making decisions about resource allocation. But if the direction has already been chosen, then it’s not strategic, it’s operational.
In his view, strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions an organization to win, however “winning” is defined for that organization. It involves making hard choices about where to play and how to win. It’s about generating insight, testing logic, accepting tradeoffs, and embracing risk
Planning, by contrast, is about detailing how to deliver on those choices. It’s about timelines, tactics, and execution. It’s about turning decisions into work.
When an organization says it needs strategic planning, I often find that they either:
– Haven’t yet made the core strategic choices, and therefore need a strategy partner, or
– Have already made those choices, and therefore need a planning partner, or
– Need both—but haven’t clarified the order of operations or the kind of partnership they’re seeking.
That lack of clarity often leads to frustration. It leads to hiring partners who bring the wrong tools or trying to force creativity into a project management structure that rewards efficiency over possibility.
Strategy and Planning Are Different Modes of Work
At Further Degree, we intentionally separate strategy from planning, both in language and in process.
Strategy work is about identifying a preferable future and positioning the organization to pursue it. It’s inherently creative. It asks leaders to step back, embrace ambiguity, and make choices that set the conditions for growth, resilience, or impact. This work includes:
– Naming ambition and clarifying purpose
– Surfacing insights through research, stakeholder engagement, or trend analysis
– Assessing current positioning and risk
– Exploring alternatives—different “futures”—and choosing a path
– Making integrated choices about where to play and how to win
It’s not about guessing the future. It’s about understanding which future we prefer and building toward it deliberately.
Planning work is about implementation. It’s the commitment to act, and to organize our resources, people, and time in service of the strategic choices we’ve already made. This work includes:
– Clarifying roles, responsibilities, and workflows
– Developing timelines and project milestones
– Building decision-making and feedback loops
– Defining metrics and reporting systems
– Creating documentation to support accountability and alignment
Both are important. But they are not interchangeable—and they require different tools, different energy, and different partners.
Experience Matters, Too
There’s another dimension that often goes unspoken in conversations about strategic work: the kind of experience your organization wants to have during the process.
Some organizations want something efficient and repeatable. They want a team to come in, run a model, produce a plan, and hand over a report. If they have the budget, they often hire the Accentures of the world—firms with mature processes and scalable toolkits.
That’s not a wrong choice. It’s just a particular kind of experience.
Other organizations want something more bespoke. They want to be seen. They want a partner who will listen deeply, reflect their culture back to them, and help them build a strategy and/or plan that’s rooted in their lived experience. They want something co-created, not imposed.
That’s the space Further Degree often operates in. We work with organizations that are growing, evolving, and navigating complexity. Many of them are nonprofit or civic organizations, or small-to-mid-sized companies with a strong mission orientation. For them, the process is not just a means to an end. It’s a moment of transformation.
So the second question I encourage clients to ask, after clarifying whether they need strategy, planning, or both, is:
What kind of experience do you want your people to have?
– Do you want your leadership team to feel seen and stretched?
– Do you want a toolset you can reuse?
– Do you want the process itself to build trust, momentum, and capacity?
Being honest about your preferences will shape who you hire—and whether the process helps your team grow.
So… What Do You Actually Need?
If you’re exploring “strategic planning” support, start by clarifying the following:
– Have we made the big choices yet?
– Do we need to decide where we’re going—or figure out how to get there?
– Do we want a repeatable, consultant-led experience or a more collaborative, bespoke process?
– What does success look like—not just in the final deliverable, but in how we get there?
Getting clear about these things will help you find the right partner. It will also make the work more rewarding for your team.
Closing Thought: You Deserve More Than a Buzzword
“Strategic planning” sounds tidy. But it’s often vague, overloaded, and misleading.
If you treat it as a single, unified process, you risk blending two very different kinds of thinking—strategic and operational—and watering them both down. That’s what Roger Martin warns against. And he’s right.
What your organization actually needs is clarity.
Do you need a strategy? A plan? Or both?
And once you know that, how do you want your team to experience the process of getting there?
At Further Degree, we help organizations design both—separately, intentionally, and in alignment with who you are and what you’re becoming. Because the future you’re building toward deserves more than a buzzword. It deserves thoughtful choices, meaningful design, and a clear path forward.