All great strategies have key elements, goals, actions, and metrics. No matter the strategy’s scope and complexity or even the company’s size, great strategies include these elements. So, successful strategic planning accounts for all.

When a strategic planning process incorporates these elements, strategies become simple and guide decisions.

Everyone reading the strategic plan, employees, business partners, investors, or other stakeholders, should be able to answer these questions.

We at Business Savvy help you with writing and implementing the Five Key Elements of Strategic Plan.

Start by defining your organisation’s vision (its destination).

This is an expression of the unique Point Of View you bring to the market. Make it simple, different, inspiring, and positive. People who read your vision should be able to understand exactly what you stand for.

Why you need a vision

• Bring alignment to your organisation. People will unify their efforts towards a common goal, driving increased efficiency.
• Create strategies that are cohesive and focused.
• Inspire employees, investors, and other stakeholders to invest emotionally and commercially in your business.

Knowing your vision isn’t enough. Create a vision statement to articulate it and explicitly define it.

Values really don’t get the credit they deserve. People often see them as a throw-away and vacuous – more aimed at marketing the organisation than guiding its true internal behaviours. But a well-crafted set of values can be the difference between success and failure in the execution of your strategic plan.

How establishing core values help

• Assess your current state (the starting point) as an honest reflection of what you do well and are proud of doing.
• Make better decisions by ruling out courses of action that are not appropriate for your company.
• Recruit people who share your beliefs and passions.

The values that go into your strategic plan shape your culture and are not aimed at customers. Instead, they are a frank self-assessment of how your organisation’s people behave as they deliver against your vision and focus areas. They should reflect the values of your very best people and the values that have helped you to succeed the most in your journey to date.

If your strategy clashes with your company’s culture or values, it will fail. Identifying your core values is a critical component towards defining your starting point and your journey.

A strategic plan leads nowhere without a set of clearly defined outcomes. Visions, missions, and focus areas are a great starting point – but no one will take your plan seriously unless you can clearly articulate what steps you are going to take to get there – and what success looks like for each of those steps.

Not all of your outcomes will be immediately quantifiable – and that’s ok (your KPIs below will help you in those cases). But when you define your outcomes, make sure they look like this:

A strategic plan leads nowhere without a set of clearly defined outcomes. Visions, missions, and focus areas are a great starting point – but no one will take your plan seriously unless you can clearly articulate what steps you are going to take to get there – and what success looks like for each of those steps.

Not all of your outcomes will be immediately quantifiable – and that’s ok (your KPIs below will help you in those cases). But when you define your outcomes, make sure they look like this:

This is such a small detail, but it is also one of the key elements of a strategic plan that so many organisations fail to implement. A lack of accountability will absolutely destroy your strategy execution. Lacking or confusing accountability results in:

• Outcomes not being delivered because no one knew who was in charge.
• Conflicting interpretations of what the business should be working on.
• Increased “finger pointing” and hearsay when things don’t go to plan.
• No one taking any satisfaction or pride in the outcomes delivered by their team.

Define accountability in the initial strategic plan as part of defining your journey. Ideally, the people responsible for a particular segment of your plan should also have been critical contributors to the plan itself.

Contribution drives engagement.

Engagement enforces self-accountability.

Accountability enables execution.

For each of your outcomes, simply state ONE single person who will have primary accountability for that outcome. Avoid defining yourself accountable for every single outcome.

It’s fine for the owner to invite other people to work on the outcome (either by cascading the goal or inviting collaborators), but it needs to be clear that the PRIMARY accountability sits with the one individual initially assigned to the outcome and no one else.

KPI stands for key performance indicator, a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. KPIs provide targets for teams to shoot for, milestones to track progress, and insights that help people across the organisation make better decisions.

Creating KPIs is probably the hardest part of a strategic plan. But without them, you won’t know until it’s too late whether or not you’re succeeding towards your vision.

Note that KPIs are not the metrics you set to create your outcomes from step three. Rather, KPIs should relate to how well you’re delivering against the components of your mission or focus areas. Selecting the right KPIs is, therefore, one of the key elements of a strategic plan.