Your Strategic Plan Isn’t Broken. It’s Incomplete. A New Take on Strategic Planning 2026.

By Erin Sedor  |  Black Fox Strategy

Here’s something I almost never hear from the CEOs I work with: “My strategic plan is terrible.”

What I hear instead is some version of: “The plan is fine. The goals make sense. But something’s off and I can’t put my finger on it.”

They’re not wrong. And they’re not crazy. Something is off. But it’s not what they think. The plan isn’t the problem. What the plan was never designed to look for—that’s the problem. This is

The “Good Enough” Trap

Most strategic plans are built using the same basic playbook. Review last year’s results. Update the SWOT. Set goals for the next three to five years. Cascade them to the team. Rinse, repeat. The process feels productive. The document looks professional. Everyone leaves the offsite feeling aligned.

And then, somewhere around month four, the familiar drift sets in. The plan stops informing decisions and starts sitting on a shelf. Not because people forgot about it. Because the plan doesn’t have the structural depth to stay relevant when the world shifts—which it does, constantly.

Ninety percent of organizations fail to execute strategy successfully. That number, originally published by Kaplan and Norton through their work at Harvard Business School, has held steady for decades. It’s been cited so many times it’s almost lost its power. But sit with it for a moment: nine out of ten. And the reasons given haven’t changed, either—poor communication, lack of leadership, failure to tie strategy to operations.

Those are all real. But they’re symptoms.

The root cause is upstream, in how the plan was designed in the first place. Specifically, in what the design process was and wasn’t built to reveal.

What Traditional Planning Misses

The standard planning framework treats organizations like machines: define the destination, engineer the route, measure progress against the map. It’s a logic model, and it works fine—as long as the world cooperates. It rarely does.

But there’s a deeper flaw than the rigidity problem. Traditional planning asks what do we want to achieve? and how will we get there? Those are important questions. They’re just not sufficient questions. They produce a list of goals organized by function or timeline, without ever testing whether the strategy is structurally complete.

I’ve spent more than three decades working with organizations of every size, type, and complexity—from billion-dollar government contractors to five-person nonprofits. The same pattern shows up in all of them: strategic plans that look comprehensive but are actually lopsided. Heavy on revenue targets and market expansion. Light on—or entirely missing—the internal capacity building, the adaptive mechanisms, and the foundational purpose work that determine whether those targets hold or collapse under their own weight.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: the imbalance is invisible from the inside. The plan reads as comprehensive because it covers all the categories the process is designed to address. Revenue growth, operational efficiency, market expansion, talent acquisition, technology investment. Solid goals, all of them. But line them up and ask a different question—which of these serves our long-term adaptive capacity, and which of these serves next quarter’s dashboard?—and the picture shifts. Eighty percent of leaders feel their company is good at crafting strategy. Only 44 percent feel good about implementation. That 36-point confidence gap isn’t an execution problem. It’s a signal that the plan itself isn’t providing the structural clarity leaders need to act.

The plans aren’t bad. They’re incomplete. And the process that built them was never designed to catch what’s missing.

A Different Set of Questions for Strategic Planning 2026

The Essential Strategy Formula was designed to solve exactly this problem. Not by replacing your planning process, but by adding a diagnostic layer that reveals what traditional methods overlook.

It starts with a premise that holds regardless of your industry, size, or complexity: every organization needs three things to succeed long-term—Purpose, Growth, and Evolution—held together by a fourth discipline: Equilibrium.

Purpose is not your mission statement. It’s the lived experience of why the organization exists, felt by the people inside it and recognized by those it serves. When purpose is authentic and actively cultivated, it becomes the gravitational center that holds strategy together. When it’s hollow, everything downstream drifts.

Growth isn’t just revenue. It’s the intentional expansion of capabilities, matched by the internal capacity to sustain that expansion. Growth that outpaces internal readiness isn’t strategy. It’s accumulation—and it breaks things.

Evolution is the dimension most plans leave out entirely. Not because leaders don’t think about the future, but because the planning process wasn’t built to surface it. An organization without deliberate Evolution imperatives is one that’s growing into a future it hasn’t prepared for.

And Equilibrium is the integrating discipline—the strategic awareness that Purpose, Growth, and Evolution exist in dynamic tension with each other, and that pursuing one at the expense of the others creates the kind of structural imbalance that eventually collapses the whole thing.

Here’s the part that matters most if you’re sitting with a plan that feels incomplete: you don’t have to start over to apply this.

You Already Have a Plan. You Don’t Have to Blow It Up to Make It Better.

The most powerful application of the Essential Strategy lens isn’t building a new plan from scratch. It’s mapping the plan you already have. This is the CEO strategy upgrade.

Pull your top-level strategic imperatives off the page. Map each one to Purpose, Growth, or Evolution. And then look at what the map reveals.

In my experience, most organizations discover their plan is heavily weighted toward Growth. That’s not surprising—growth is where the board pressure lives. But an organization with no Evolution imperatives has no mechanism for adapting to a changing world. An organization with no internal Purpose imperative—nothing that speaks to thriving from within—is running a strategy that depends entirely on external outcomes. Growth without purpose is a house built on sand. Growth without evolution is a house with no windows.

These imbalances don’t show up in a traditional strategic plan. They don’t surface in quarterly reviews. But they are the structural risks that determine whether your strategy sustains itself or quietly unravels.

Organizational strategy is meant to be evolved, not completely upended.

Once you can see them, you can address them. And you can do that without throwing away the plan you’ve already built. This is your move for strategic planning 2026.

The Conversation That Changes Everything

There’s a companion piece to the mapping exercise that most leadership teams have never had: the risk appetite conversation. Not the compliance version that lives in a governance document doing nothing useful. The strategic version—the one where your leadership team defines how far, how fast, and how much the organization is willing to commit.

How much do we invest before the cost is too great? How fast can we grow without sacrificing existing value? To what extent are we willing to change? What threats could disrupt the critical path?

Four questions. Each one tied to the strategic dimensions your plan should already be addressing. Each one creating a defined boundary that protects the strategy from incremental drift—the slow, invisible accumulation of risk that happens when limits are never set.

Most organizations have never had this conversation explicitly. They’ve made thousands of individual decisions that implicitly answered these questions—but never sat down as a leadership team and defined the boundaries on purpose. The result is what I call strategic drift: a gradual, invisible accumulation of exposure where each incremental decision feels rational in isolation, but the cumulative effect quietly overshoots every limit that was never set.

Without this conversation, organizations overshoot those limits and don’t realize it until something breaks. With it, strategic decisions get faster because the boundaries are already defined. Resource allocation gets clearer because you’ve named what you’re willing to spend and where the line is. And the leadership team stops debating risk in the abstract because they have a shared framework for evaluating it in real time.

What You’re Actually Building Toward

Strengthening your strategic plan through this lens isn’t just about filling gaps. It’s about developing a set of organizational capabilities that determine whether strategy can sustain itself through complexity and disruption.

I call these the Attributes of the Quantum Intelligent Organization: Aspiration and Alignment paired to Purpose, Intelligence and Decisiveness paired to Growth, and Navigation and Adaptation paired to Evolution. Six attributes, each one observable and measurable, each one telling you something specific about your organization’s strategic fitness.

An organization with strong Aspiration but weak Alignment has a compelling purpose that never connects to the work. An organization growing fast with low Intelligence and Decisiveness is running on instinct and luck. An organization with weak Navigation and Adaptation is reacting to change rather than anticipating it.

These aren’t abstract ideals. They’re diagnostic markers. And when you layer them onto the PGEE map and risk appetite boundaries, you get a remarkably clear picture of where your strategy is strong, where it’s vulnerable, and where focused investment has the highest leverage.

The full exercise—mapping your imperatives, defining your boundaries, and assessing these six attributes—is laid out step by step in Black Fox Strategy’s CEO’s Guide to Better Strategy (Without Starting Over). It’s designed to be something you can do with your leadership team in a focused session. No consultants required. No new methodology to learn. Just a more complete lens applied to the strategy you’ve already built.

If you’ve taken the PGEE Strategy Health Check, you already have a scored baseline across all four dimensions. The mapping exercise described here is the logical next step—what to do with what you found.

If you haven’t taken it, start there. It’s free, it’s honest, and it will tell you things about your strategy’s structural design that no quarterly business review ever will.

The plan you have is a starting point, not a finished product. The organizations that thrive aren’t the ones with the most polished strategic documents. They’re the ones that see their strategy clearly enough to keep making it better.

You already have a plan. Now make it work harder.

Ready to see what your strategy is really made of? Start with the PGEE Strategy Health Check—a free self-assessment for CEOs and executive directors. Or download the CEO’s Guide to Better Strategy (Without Starting Over) for the full exercise. Visit ErinSedor.com or reach out at erin@erinsedor.com.

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Erin Sedor is an executive advisor and strategic performance expert with 30+ years helping organizations build strategy that actually works. She is the creator of Essential Strategy and the Quantum Intelligence framework for conscious, adaptive leadership.