Why Strategic Planning Is Struggling, and the Five Shifts Leaders Are Making

Strategic planning has never been easy. But today’s compressed economic cycles, shifting customer expectations, and AI-enabled analysis are exposing structural weaknesses in traditional strategic planning approaches.

Inside organizations, the strain is visible. Competing leadership priorities cascade into conflicting signals for teams. Teams are asked to absorb more initiatives, manage more dependencies, and deliver faster, often without clear trade-offs or additional capacity.

In this environment, traditional planning approaches struggle. Eighteen-month cycles take time to execute, and by the time plans are finalized, assumptions have shifted. Many organizations find themselves overbuilt for planning and underbuilt for decision-making.

What’s emerging is not the end of strategic planning, but a shift in what it must do. Planning is becoming less about producing a perfect plan and more about enabling better decisions and faster alignment as conditions change. Leaders are moving away from treating strategy as a static document and toward using it as an active discipline that helps organizations navigate uncertainty with clarity, realism, and intent.

Many of these pressures are explored further in our 2026 Tech Industry Insights Report.

Across organizations, leaders are rethinking how strategy shows up in practice. Each of the following shifts replaces a familiar leadership comfort zone with a harder, more consequential choice.

# Executive Summary: The Strategic Planning Shifts Leaders Are Being Forced to Make

# Shift 1: From Coordination to Alignment Through Shared Enterprise Goals

Leadership Decision: Are we willing to stop managing dependencies and instead commit to a small number of enterprise outcomes?

Many organizations try to solve cross-functional friction through coordination. Interlock meetings, dependency tracking, and governance forums help manage complexity, but they rarely create true alignment. Coordination keeps teams informed, but it does not ensure they are moving in the same direction.

When teams spend more time coordinating handoffs than moving outcomes, the problem isn’t execution - it’s shared direction.

Leaders are refocusing on shared, specific enterprise goals as the primary driver of alignment. Direction matters. Let’s take an example: saying “let’s go to Switzerland” provides a general sense of movement, but it leaves too much open to interpretation. Teams optimize locally and progress fragments. Saying “let’s get to Bern” creates a clear destination and a shared point of convergence.

Clarity on the destination does not prescribe the journey. Teams can decide how to get there based on their starting point, constraints, and capabilities. Some may take a train, others a plane. What matters is that choices align with the same outcome.

When enterprise goals are clear and shared, cross-functional collaboration improves without added overhead. Trade-offs surface earlier, dependencies become easier to manage, and alignment shifts from something leaders enforce to something teams internalize.

# Shift 2: From Rigid Structure to Clear Direction With Room to Adapt

Leadership Decision: Are we willing to let go of fixed structures and trust teams to organize around outcomes?

Even with shared enterprise goals, structure often becomes the next constraint. Functional boundaries, ownership models, and decision rights can unintentionally slow progress, especially when work spans multiple teams. The issue is not that the structure is wrong, but that it is often treated as fixed, even when the work is not.

Leaders are shifting how they use structure in strategic planning. Rather than letting the org chart dictate how work happens, they are emphasizing clear direction and fewer enterprise priorities and allowing teams more flexibility in how they organize to deliver against them.

This shows up in practical ways: forming temporary, cross-functional teams around specific outcomes, clarifying decision rights instead of layering governance, and organizing around the work itself rather than permanent reporting lines. When direction is clear, teams can adapt without losing alignment.

The key distinction is intentionality. Strategy provides continuity of direction, even as teams adapt their approach. Teams are given room to flex how they get there. In a fast-changing environment, adaptability becomes a design choice, not an exception.

For a deeper look at how operating model design must adapt to support strategic intent, see Can Your Operating Model Withstand AI Disruption?

# Shift 3: From Aspirational Roadmaps to Capacity-Informed Strategy

Decision: Are we willing to say no to good ideas because we don’t have the capacity to do them well?

As alignment improves and teams are given more flexibility, a harder constraint quickly surfaces: capacity. Many strategic plans still assume that priorities can be layered on without a clear view of what the organization can realistically support. The result is roadmaps that look coherent on paper but strain execution in practice.

Leaders are beginning to treat capacity as a strategic input, not an afterthought. This goes beyond headcount. It requires understanding where critical skills sit, how work overlaps across teams, and where bottlenecks are likely to emerge. Without this view, planning becomes aspirational rather than actionable.

If everything is a priority, capacity becomes fiction - and teams pay the price for leadership optimism.

AI is starting to play a useful role here. Teams are experimenting with AI-assisted capacity modeling to better understand skill gaps, surface dependencies, and stress-test scenarios. The goal is not perfect forecasts, but more honest conversations about what can be delivered and what must be sequenced or deferred.

This is where capacity planning becomes inseparable from growth strategy. Leaders are forced to make explicit choices about where to invest. Are you focused on extracting more value from the current business, or are you investing to build new capabilities that enable future growth? In simple terms, are you squeezing more juice from today’s lemons, or are you planting new lemon trees?

Making these choices explicit strengthens credibility. It gives teams clarity about where to focus, aligns investment with intent, and reduces the quiet overload that comes from trying to pursue both paths at once.

# Shift 4: From Output-Focused Planning to Outcome-Driven Decision-Making

Decision: Are we willing to stop work, even if it’s on plan, when it’s no longer driving meaningful outcomes?

Even when goals are clear and capacity is understood, many planning efforts still default to outputs. Plans emphasize initiatives launched, milestones met, and artifacts delivered. These signals are easy to track, but they are weak indicators of whether your strategy is actually working.

Leaders are shifting the conversation toward outcomes.

Green status reports don’t mean progress if the outcome hasn’t moved.

Instead of asking what will be delivered, they are asking what will change as a result. Outcomes create a clearer line of sight to customer impact and business value, and they provide a stronger basis for prioritization and trade-offs.

This shift matters most when conditions change. Outputs lock teams into predefined work. Outcomes allow teams to adapt their approach while staying aligned to intent. When outcomes are explicit, teams can adjust tactics, stop work that no longer serves the goal, and redirect effort without waiting for the next planning cycle.

Outcome-driven planning also sharpens accountability. It clarifies what success looks like, who is responsible for it, and how progress will be measured. For teams operating under real constraints, this focus reduces busywork and channels effort toward what actually moves the needle.

When strategy is anchored in outcomes rather than activity, planning becomes less about producing plans and more about determining what stops.

Related Content: From Dashboards to Control Towers: Creating Organizational Visibility with a Metric Hierarchy

# Shift 5: From Exhaustive Planning to Courageous Focus and Simplification

Decision: Are we willing to choose fewer priorities, make trade-offs explicit, and accept uncertainty?

As planning adapts to uncertainty, many leaders are reaching the same conclusion: doing more is not the answer. Exhaustive plans, detailed roadmaps, and layered governance often create the illusion of control while diffusing focus and slowing execution.

Leaders are shifting toward courageous simplification. This means prioritizing fewer initiatives, making trade-offs explicit, and accepting that not every decision can be optimized upfront. Progress is valued over perfection, and learning is built into the plan rather than treated as a failure.

This shift requires clarity. Teams need a small set of well-defined priorities that guide decision-making day to day. When everything is important, nothing is. Clear priorities reduce duplication, cut through planning pageantry, and make it easier for teams to focus their limited capacity on what matters most.

It also requires courage. Saying no, stopping work, and acknowledging uncertainty are leadership behaviors, not planning gaps.

When planning is simplified and focus is sustained, strategy becomes more credible, more actionable, and more resilient. In an environment where change is constant, the ability to choose and commit matters more than the ability to predict.

# Where Strategic Planning Must Evolve

Taken together, these shifts point to a broader change in how strategic planning works in practice.

Shared enterprise goals create alignment. Clear direction gives teams room to organize and move. Capacity grounds ambition in reality. Outcomes keep focus on what actually matters. Courageous simplification makes progress possible. Each shift reinforces the others, and together they redefine what effective planning requires.

AI can accelerate insight, surface patterns, and help leaders test assumptions. It does not resolve the hardest parts of strategy. Making trade-offs, choosing where to focus, stopping work that no longer serves the goal, and creating space for learning remain deeply human responsibilities. In many ways, the faster the environment moves, the more important those leadership choices become.

For leaders responsible for strategic planning, the opportunity is not to perfect the process, but to reflect honestly on how planning shows up in their organization today. Where does coordination substitute for alignment? Where does aspiration outpace capacity? Where are teams delivering outputs without clarity on outcomes?

Strategic planning will not improve simply by becoming more detailed or more sophisticated. It regains its impact when it becomes less about producing documents and more about enforcing clarity under constraint.