By Malcolm Kambanzera
Many organisations have strategic plans. Far fewer have strategy.
Every few years, boards and management teams retreat to conference rooms, revisit their vision and mission, conduct a SWOT analysis, formulate strategic objectives and eventually produce an “impressive document” setting out where the organisation intends to be over the next three to five years.
The document is approved. It is presented to employees. Sometimes it is professionally designed, printed and displayed prominently. Then ordinary business resumes.
This is where one of the most persistent misconceptions in organisational management begins: the assumption that having a strategic plan means that an organisation has a strategy. It does not!
The Difference Between Planning and Strategy
A strategic plan is ultimately a document. Strategy is a set of choices. Strategy requires an organisation to determine where it intends to compete, what it will prioritise, what it will deliberately not pursue, how its resources will be allocated and what capabilities it must develop to achieve its objectives.
This distinction matters because organisations can become exceptionally good at planning while remaining remarkably poor at making strategic choices.
A strategic plan containing fifteen priorities, thirty objectives and seventy performance indicators may appear comprehensive. Strategically, however, it may reveal something entirely different: an organisation unwilling or unable to choose.
Resources are finite. Management attention is finite. Institutional capacity is finite. Strategy therefore requires prioritisation.
The difficult question is not simply, “What should we do?” It is also, “What are we prepared not to do?”
Strategy is a Governance Question
Strategy execution is frequently described as a management responsibility. That is correct, but incomplete. There is also a significant governance dimension.
A board that approves a strategy assumes responsibility for exercising oversight over its implementation.
Approval cannot therefore be the end of the board’s involvement. Boards should continuously interrogate whether organisational resources, leadership capacity, institutional structures and performance systems remain aligned with the strategy they approved.
More than often, an organisation identifies digital transformation as a strategic priority but allocates virtually no capital towards technology, retains processes designed for a paper-based environment and develops no corresponding digital capabilities. Its stated strategy says one thing.
Its resource allocation says another. When the two conflict, the budget usually reveals the organisation’s real priorities.
This is why strategy cannot be separated from budgeting, organisational design, human resources and performance management.
These are not merely administrative functions surrounding strategy. They are mechanisms through which strategy becomes operational.
“I Said We Don’t Have the Capacity!”
There is another uncomfortable question that organisations sometimes avoid. And that is, whether we actually possess the capabilities required to execute what we have promised?
An organisation may aspire to expand into new markets, digitise its operations, diversify its revenue, improve service delivery or become more commercially sustainable. Those ambitions may be entirely reasonable. But ambition is not capability.
Strategy must ultimately confront the organisation as it exists, not merely the organisation described in its vision statement.
If a strategic objective requires specialised expertise, technology, capital, institutional partnerships or management systems that the organisation does not currently possess, the development or acquisition of those capabilities must itself form part of the strategy.
Otherwise, the strategic plan becomes an expression of aspiration rather than a credible pathway towards organisational change.
The Budget is Not Budgeting
One of the simplest ways of assessing whether an organisation takes its strategy seriously is to examine its budget.
Take the strategic priorities listed in the plan and compare them against actual resource allocation.
Where is the money going? Where is management spending its time? Which positions are being recruited? Which systems are being developed? Which projects receive capital? Which performance indicators determine executive accountability?
If the answers bear little relationship to the strategic plan, the organisation may have a planning document, but it does not yet have an operating strategy. This is particularly important for boards.
Financial oversight and strategic oversight should not operate as separate governance exercises.
The budget should, in many respects, represent the financial expression of strategy. From Strategic Planning to Strategic Governance Boards therefore need to move beyond periodically approving strategic plans towards practising strategic governance.
That means asking harder questions. What assumptions underpin this strategy? What capabilities are required to execute it? What resources have been committed? What trade-offs have been made?
What indicators will tell us whether the strategy is succeeding? What developments would justify changing direction?
And perhaps most importantly: What has the organisation stopped doing because it decided something else was more important? These questions move governance away from passive approval towards active strategic oversight.
Management must execute strategy. The board must ensure that the organisation remains strategically directed, adequately resourced and appropriately accountable. Neither role can be performed effectively if strategy exists primarily as a document.
The Bottom Line
The quality of a strategic plan should not be judged by its length, terminology or presentation. It should be judged by the quality of the choices it contains and the organisational behaviour those choices produce.
A credible strategy should influence budgets. It should influence recruitment. It should influence investment.
It should influence performance agreements. It should influence what management discusses. And ultimately, it should influence what the organisation chooses not to do.
When none of these things change after a strategic plan is approved, the problem is not necessarily poor implementation. The more fundamental problem may be that planning took place, but strategy never did.
*Malcolm Kambanzera is a scholar of Management Strategy and holds a Bachelor of Laws (Honours).
