Not sure where to start with your strategic plan? Begin with your story.
It’s harder than ever to write a strategic plan in 2026. The rate of change for every business has accelerated. AI makes long-held assumptions feel questionable. As early as 2013, Stanford’s business school declared “the strategic plan is dead.”
The more uncertain the future is, the more essential it is for your team to have a clear strategy. Yet, many companies have given up on the strategic planning process altogether and those that do engage in efforts ill-conceived and half-hearted: 67 percent of all strategic plans ultimately fail.
Want to write a strategic plan that doesn’t just “sit on a shelf”?
Every great plan starts with a strategic narrative. Brands with a defined StoryKernel begin with the foundation required for a successful strategic plan. With a brand story in hand, there are four steps to creating your plan:
- Source Objectives
- Affinitize Ideas
- Prioritize the Strategy
- Shape the Plan
How to Get Started: Use Your Strategic Narrative
It’s easy to look at your strategic plan as a way to create change in your organization. But it’s even more important to understand what is not changing; stability provides your team the confidence needed to embrace the risks inherent in any strategy.
Every brand should define their strategic narrative before embarking on a strategic planning process.
When the strategic planning process begins, there’s a temptation to jump right into brainstorming ideas. But 75 percent of the effort associated with the plan should go towards the foundation it’s built on.
A strategic narrative, like Woden’s StoryKernel, captures your company’s defined viewpoint about your market, why the status quo is no longer tenable, and why you are the most credible partner for your customers.
Following the StoryKernel process to create a brand story provides a way to surface input from your team and customers. Interviews generate early buy-in; even those not directly tasked with drafting the plan will have a voice in the process, and the initial ideas for the plan can be identified through interviews.
Asking people what they want in the strategic plan can result in iterative and often tactical thinking. Challenging them to consider the brand’s overall narrative allows them to look at the future in a new way and unlocks thinking that otherwise might be obscured.
The StoryKernel framework creates alignment in the team: by helping everyone understand the organization’s value in the form of a simple, succinct story, people can understand the strategy that makes you different.
When you develop the Messaging Hierarchy contained in your StoryKernel, your team will gain a clear purpose, mission, vision, and values. This ensures your entire team understands what future the strategic plan wants to create for the company and has had a voice in developing it.
Finally, when teams begin to develop a strategic plan, there’s a natural tendency to look at objectives from the perspective of what the team will need to do to achieve them. Crafting the StoryKernel provides an indirect way to capture the company’s long-term strategy and can help the team think big without self-imposed constraints.
Once the StoryKernel is defined, you are ready to build your plan. You will find that it comes together quickly with the brand story already in place.
Step 1: Source Objectives
The first step to creating the strategic plan is sourcing objectives from the team. Everyone has ideas on how to improve the company; a good strategic planning process focuses that thinking.
Form a working group charged with developing the plan, led by a facilitator. This group should involve leaders from across the organization. Although a limited number of people will be directly involved in drafting the plan, breadth and diversity in the working group will create legitimacy for the plan once it’s drafted.
Tip: Enlist someone to facilitate your planning process early on. A good facilitator can be internal or external, but should be committed to the strategic narrative and objective about the contributions of others. A strong, internal strategic leader (such as a CEO or President) is often not an ideal plan facilitator for this reason.
Use the StoryKernel and Messaging Hierarchy to create alignment with the working group and the mission. Prompt the team with: “What are the objectives we will need to achieve to realize what’s captured in our StoryKernel?”
Because the strategic narrative captures how you want the brand to be seen and how you keep your customer promises, focusing your team on identifying the gaps between where you are today and what the story defines will ensure your plan remains customer-centric.
Tip: Create a strong constraint during this phase, such as limiting objectives to three per person.
If your team has completed the StoryKernel process prior to developing the strategic plan, they likely have already considered many of the inputs for this phase. The facilitator should accept everyone’s initial objectives without editing or critique.
Step 2: Affinitize Ideas
Depending on the size of the working group developing your plan, there could be upwards of 50 objectives to consider. The facilitator should organize these ideas by “affinitizing” them: group similar objectives into categories aligned with the strategic narrative.
Affinitizing allows the working group to see common themes. As these categories come together, the team should be encouraged to add objectives that they feel are potentially missing (without adding new categories).
Tip: Stakeholders not involved in drafting the strategic plan were interviewed during the StoryKernel process. Review these interviews to surface additional objectives identified by the working group.
The objective here is to provide a full view of the key areas the plan will need to address (the affinitized categories) and the variety of objectives that people feel will need to be achieved in order to do so.
Tip: The facilitator should review and affinitize all objectives prior to bringing the working group together, but can and should encourage discussion and contributions live. Nothing should be removed or debated in this step. Affinitizing can be combined in a single working session with the following step, prioritization.
Step 3: Prioritize the Strategy
Once the working group has identified all of the objectives that could sit within the plan, they must be prioritized. A good strategic plan places as much emphasis on what not to do as to which objectives are included.
Provide the working group time to vote on the objectives. Each team member should vote on the objectives they believe are most important to include in the strategic plan. While each person should receive the same number of votes to allocate across objectives, they should be free to do so in any way they choose (such as providing multiple votes to one objective to more heavily weight it).
The facilitator should create a constraint relative to the number of objectives; for example, if there are 50 objectives in consideration, consider limiting people to 10 votes each.
Tip: Prior to voting on objectives, review the StoryKernel and Messaging Hierarchy with the working group. Use this as an opportunity to reinforce that the plan must align with the strategy the organization has already committed to.
Following voting, the objectives will have been sorted across three natural breakpoints: objectives with no or few votes, those with a significant number of votes, and a “murky middle.”
Step 4: Shape the Plan
These break points allow for the working group to organize its own discussions and debates. The facilitator should first surface the items with few or no votes and allow anyone to make a case for including them in the plan; those without support can be discarded.
Likewise, the objectives with significant support should be opened up for anyone to make a contrary case. Those with wide support should be advanced for inclusion in the strategic plan. The working group can then spend its time discussing the objectives in the “murky middle” to determine which belong in the plan and which do not.
Tip: In debated objectives, the StoryKernel and Messaging Hierarchy are the arbiter of what belongs in the plan. The facilitator should re-anchor the working group in the brand story when it can’t reach consensus, and challenge them to consider ideas through the lens of whether they align with the narrative.
Once there is consensus on what objectives should be included, the facilitator should draft the strategic plan. At this time they should re-affinitize the objectives around a small number of strategies. These strategies should be clear, measurable, and connected with the StoryKernel.
Each strategy should be supported by a handful of objectives sourced in the planning process. In crafting the plan, the facilitator should be empowered to consolidate or edit objectives and to refine strategies based on the affinitized groups used earlier. The final structure of the strategic plan does not need to align with how inputs were organized during development.
Tip: It is important to right-size the strategic plan to the reality of your organization. Younger and smaller companies should adopt a three-year plan with a smaller number of strategies, whereas larger organizations can look to a five-year horizon with more strategies and clearer objectives. The “right” plan for your organization is the one you can achieve with the resources you have available to you.
The drafted plan should be shared with the working group first for feedback and revision. Once this group’s buy-in has been secured, it should be brought to other stakeholders across the organization for endorsement prior to its official adoption.
Ensuring Your Strategic Plan is Achieved
At the start of a strategic planning process, someone will say they “don’t want a plan that just sits on the shelf.” Yet, when strategic plans are not successful, “poor execution” is identified as the culprit, as opposed to the underlying strategy itself.
If you want to ensure your strategic plan is successful:
- Be deliberate about change management. The strategic plan should be part of the overall integration of your strategic narrative. Woden’s Transformation Journey provides a six-step framework for deploying your brand story and strategic plan organization-wide.
- Align the organization with the plan. To be committed to your plan, shift organizational design to support it. This can include cross-functional teams dedicated to plan objectives and board or management responsibilities. The plan must influence how the organization operates.
- Assign ownership to each objective. A specific person should be responsible for executing each part of the strategic plan. This responsibility ensures execution of the plan is at the forefront of the team’s minds.
A successful strategic plan doesn’t just happen. But with the right foundation and an empowered team, you can be confident of achieving your objectives.
A Great Strategic Plan Requires a Clear Strategic Narrative
90 percent of organizations fail to execute their strategy. The rare few that win, and unlock the incredible growth that comes alongside execution, do so with a strategic plan that translates their narrative into strategy that aligns their team, clarifies their goals, and empowers them to execute it.
A great strategic plan provides a roadmap for every part of your organization to realize the promise captured in your StoryKernel and to unlock your own potential. If your team can’t capture its strategy, aspirations, and differentiators in a brand story, no strategic plan will reach its intended outcome.
If developing a strategic plan feels overwhelming for your organization, start with your StoryKernel. The clarity of a strategic narrative provides the foundation that sets your plan up for success long into the future.
