HR Perspective with MEMORY NGUWI
I HAVE been involved in strategy formulation for many years, and one thing has become painfully clear to me: most organisations waste far too much time and resources on strategic planning instead of real strategy formulation. The default approach that many companies follow is to treat strategy as a set of activities neatly written down in a document, complete with timelines, people responsible, and resource requirements.
This process often begins with a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis and a few other standard frameworks before moving straight into crafting so-called strategic objectives that are really just a list of things to get done. While that might be useful for organising work, it is not strategy formulation. It is simply planning.
The problem is that when people confuse the two, they end up executing plans that have no real strategic foundation, which is a waste of both effort and opportunity.
True strategy formulation is a completely different discipline from strategic planning. It requires deeper thinking, sharper choices, and a willingness to wrestle with uncertainty. Strategy formulation is not about producing a list of tasks or vague aspirations like reducing costs or increasing customer satisfaction. Those are operational aims, not strategies.
A real strategy is a set of integrated choices designed to compel customers, partners, and even competitors to act in your favour. It demands clear answers to two core questions: where will we play and how will we win? These choices must be concrete, specific, and capable of guiding the entire organisation’s actions in a unified direction.
The hallmark of a genuine strategic choice is that the opposite choice would not be obviously foolish. For example, if a company decides to target the mid-market segment rather than high-end corporate clients, the alternative of going after the high-end could still be a valid and potentially profitable decision for another business. That makes it a real choice.
By contrast, claiming your strategy is to improve customer satisfaction is meaningless because the opposite — deliberately making customers unhappy would never be rational. Such statements may sound positive, but they are not strategic; they are simply basic expectations of any competent business.
The reason so many organisations default to strategic planning rather than strategy formulation is that planning feels safe. It creates the illusion of progress because you can assign tasks, set deadlines, and track completion rates. It avoids the discomfort of making trade-offs and saying no to certain markets, products, or customer segments. It is also easier to measure the execution of activities than it is to measure the success of a strategic position, which may only become clear over the years. Yet this comfort is deceptive, because planning without the right strategic foundation means you may be working hard to implement the wrong ideas.
The cost of confusing planning with strategy is significant. Without true strategic choices, companies dilute their focus, spread resources too thin, and miss opportunities to outmanoeuvre competitors. They can end up with beautifully designed plans that are disconnected from any source of real competitive advantage.
I have seen organisations spend months producing thick, glossy strategy documents that fail to shift the company’s market position one inch. They might create a sense of busyness and alignment in the short term, but they do not change the game in the market.
Real strategy formulation requires a very different kind of process and a different kind of people. It starts with framing the high-stakes challenge or opportunity the organisation must address. It involves identifying real alternatives rather than comparing a good option to an obviously bad one. It means answering where to play and how to win in a way that defines the exact markets, customer segments, or geographies you will focus on, and the precise approach that will allow you to win there. These choices must be integrated so that they reinforce one another and align with the organisation’s capabilities and systems.
Most importantly, strategy formulation demands the involvement of your very best thinkers, the people capable of creative, analytical, and integrative thinking. They must be able to challenge assumptions, debate rigorously, and examine evidence from both the market and the organisation’s own data. It is not an exercise in filling in templates or producing impressive slides; it is thinking work, and it is often messy, uncomfortable, and iterative. But when it is done well, the results are powerful because the organisation has a clear direction that inspires confidence and drives coordinated action.
Strategic planning has a role, but it should only come after you have a sound strategy to plan for. Planning without a real strategy is like mapping out the perfect road trip without ever deciding on a destination. You may travel quickly and efficiently, but you will have no guarantee that you will end up anywhere worth going. The real value lies in making those tough, deliberate choices about where to compete and how to win, and then building the plan to deliver on those choices.
If companies invested as much energy, brainpower, and resources into formulating real strategies as they do into producing plans, they would find themselves with far stronger market positions, more coherent operations, and a greater ability to adapt to change.
The next time your organisation embarks on a strategy process, pause and ask yourself: are we making real strategic choices, or are we just making plans? If the answer is the latter, stop, bring your best people together, and do the hard work of thinking. Decide where to play. Decide how to win. Make choices that truly matter. That is strategy formulation. That is how you create something worth planning for.
l Nguwi is managing consultant at Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd. Email mnguwi@ipcconsultants. com